CONTENTS Vol. 03, No. 02 | Winter 2018
Courtesy of Jake Hills on Unsplash
ii About MSJ iii Letter from the Editor Greg Chan
iv Contributors
ARTICLES 03
Looking through the Beast’s Eyes?: The Dialectics of Seeing the Monster and Being Seen by the Monster in Shark Horror Movies Michael Fuchs
19
The Multiplicity of a Still: Considerations of a Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker Donato Loia
33
The Three Winds of Albert Lamorisse Mark Goodall
FEATURETTES 47
Colour and Chaos: Unpacking the Mise-en-scène of Tokyo Drifter’s Reshot Finale Adam Lee Miller
REVIEWS 55
Bill and Betty and Olive: A 21st Century Melodrama Troy Michael Bordun
63
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk as Film and History Tracey J. Kinney
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ABOUT MSJ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
LAYOUT EDITOR
Greg Chan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada
Patrick Tambogon, Wilson School of Design at KPU, Canada
ADVISORY BOARD
WEBMASTER
Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada
Janik Andreas, UBC, Canada
Richard L. Edwards, Ball State University, United States Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago, United States
INTERNS
David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, United States
Sanjay Singh Aujla, KPU, Canada
Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, United States
Neil Bassan, UBC, Canada
Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Tanya M. Burnstad, KPU, Canada
Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Samantha Larder, KPU, Canada
Michael C.K. Ma, KPU, Canada
Leyla Rose Sumeli, KPU, Canada
Janice Morris, KPU, Canada
Aaron Wesley Throness, UBC, Canada
Miguel Mota, University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada Paul Risker, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
The views and opinions of all signed texts, including editorials and
Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada
regular columns, are those of the authors and do not necessarily
Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India
represent or reflect those of the editors, the editorial board or the
Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada
advisory board.
REVIEWERS
Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration
Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada
is published by Simon Fraser University, Canada
Jennifer Susan Griffiths, University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy Phillip Grayson, St John's University, United States
WEBSITE
Jack Patrick Hayes, KPU/UBC, Canada
www.kpu.ca/MESjournal
Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, United States Dan Lett, KPU, Canada
FRONT COVER IMAGE
Michael Johnston, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, United States
Courtesy of Derek Owen on Unsplash
Osakue Stevenson Omoera, Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Nigeria
BACK COVER IMAGE
Carolina Mariana Rocha, Southern Illinois University,
Courtesy of Jake Hills on Unsplash
Edwardsvillle, United States Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada
SPONSORS
Andrea Meador Smith, Shenandoah University, United States
Faculty of Arts, KPU, Canada
Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India
KDocs Documentary Film Festival, Canada
Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada
CONTACT COPYEDITORS
MSJ@kpu.ca
Heather Cyr, KPU, Canada Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada
ISSN: 2369-5056 (online)
Jennifer Susan Griffiths, University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy
ISSN: 2560-7065 (print)
ii Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, In this issue of MSJ, we are taking a deep dive into the visual narratives we cannot shake. I asked our new interns which film frame remains with them. For Leyla, it was Lizzie gazing intently at a statue in a scene from Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005). She notes that “the entire movie is stunning visually, but this scene is always what gets me. When Lizzie stares at this marble statue in the home of Mr. Darcy, with the stone veil carved so thin it looks like a sheet of fabric, I feel like she’s seeing herself. The statue is her with the veil over her eyes, not seeing Mr. Darcy for what he truly is. To me, this is the moment that she begins to see Mr. Darcy in a new light.” Then there is Aaron who recalls a frame from John Carnahan’s The Grey (2012), in which “one of the final images of the film shows Liam Neeson lying on a bed with his wife, looking into her eyes with a tender gaze. The room was bright and sterile, and blurred so as to highlight the characters. The viewers come to realize that they are on a hospital bed, and that the wife is losing her grip on life. The image was filled with complete silence, as if they were lost in time. It was tender and heartfelt, yet troublingly serene, and deeply moved me.” For myself, it was that epic sandstorm scene from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) when the guide cannot be saved from the ravenous quicksand. I had a visceral response to the image of him being consumed by the desert in what was my first encounter with death on screen. It unsettles me to this day. Leyla, Aaron, and I chose images from largely silent scenes – ones where the storytelling resonates in the point of view, the artistic gaze, and the poignancy of the mise-en-scène (plus they are all GIF-worthy, I am told). Likewise, Issue 3.2’s contributing authors have given pause to visual narratives that have struck a chord. From witnessing the war-torn shores of Dunkirk to inhabiting the shark’s point of view in horror films, this issue’s collection of articles takes you to unexpected depths of the frame. Before you begin the dive into MSJ waters, I would like to introduce you to our new cohort of interns: Mary Abad, Sanjay Aujla, Tanya Burnstad, Samantha Larder, Leyla Sumeli (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), and Aaron Throness (University of British Columbia). Their fresh perspective on mise-en-scène has sustained this issue.
Sincerely,
GREG CHAN | Editor in Chief
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CONTRIBUTORS TROY MICHAEL BORDUN
MARK GOODALL
Troy Michael Bordun is a contract instructor in Sociology at Trent University and Communication Studies at Concordia University. His Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan) was published in Fall 2017. He is currently working on an analysis of melodrama in the fi lms of Carlos Reygadas and continuing work on the significance of the solo girl subgenre in online heteroporn. An article on the latter is forthcoming in Porn Studies in July.
Mark Goodall is a lecturer in film and media at the University of Bradford (UK). He is the author of Sweet and Savage: the world through the mondo films lens, Gathering of the Tribe: music and heavy conscious creation and Th e Beatles or the ŒWhite Album (all Headpress). He is co-editor of New Media Archaeologies (AUP) and Crash Cinema: representation in film (CSP). He is editor of The Firminist, a journal about the British writer Malcolm Lowry. He co-directed and produced the fi lm ŒHoly Terrors: a collection of weird tales by Arthur Machen and plays guitar with the group Rudolf Rocker.
MICHAEL FUCHS Michael Fuchs is a fi xed-term assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. He has co-edited four books, including ConFiguring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity (Intellect Books, 2013) and Space Oddities: Diff erence and Identity in the American City (LIT Verlag, 2018), and a recent special issue of the European Journal of American Studies on animals on American television (vol. 13, no. 1, 2018). In addition, he has (co-)authored more than forty published and forthcoming journal articles and book chapters on horror and adult cinema, American television, video games, comics, and contemporary American literature. For additional information on his past and ongoing research, see www.fuchsmichael.net/.
iv Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
TRACEY J. KINNEY Tracey J. Kinney graduated with a Ph.D. in Nineteenth Century German History from the University of British Columbia in 1997. Her doctoral research focused on the Young German movement, looking in particular at the intersection between literature, censorship, and political development during the Vormärz era. Her teaching areas include Modern German History, the Holocaust, as well as the History of World Civilizations and Twentieth Century World History. In recent years, her interests have expanded into such topics as the role of textile production in global history and, most recently, food in history. she has been teaching at KPU for 22 years, and prior to that taught at Malaspina (now VIU), and the University of Victoria.
DONATO LOIA
ADAM LEE MILLER
Donato Loia is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated cum laude from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 2012 with a Master’s thesis on “Georges Bataille and Surrealism.” On the side of his academic career, he has worked with various museums and art organizations. In 2013, he was granted with a fellowship by the European Union and he worked for one year with the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) in UK as assistant curator and curator. At MIMA, he received two emerging curator bursaries financed by the Arts Council England. Between 2006 and 2012, he has been a musician and composer with several bands and toured extensively in Europe.
Adam Miller is a British lecturer who has been living and teaching in Japan for the past 10 years. He currently works for Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya City, where he was charged with creating an original Film Studies syllabus for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. Having written regular film columns for 4 different publications, he has a wide ranging taste in films, but Japanese Golden Age and New Wave cinema has held a special place in his heart since researching them for his graduate degree over a decade ago. He is currently putting together a textbook to teach Film History to EFL students.
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Photo courtesy of Jeremy Yap on Unsplash
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Looking through the Beast’s Eyes?: The Dialectics of Seeing the Monster and Being Seen by the Monster in Shark Horror Movies BY MICHAEL FUCHS | University of Graz, Austria
ABSTRACT In his seminal essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), the late John Berger argued that the visual relationship between humans and other animals is a one-way street: humans look, whereas animals are observed. However, in one of the most iconic opening scenes in (horror) film history, viewers are invited to share an animal ’s look: To the sound of alternating Es and Fs, “we” look through a great white shark's eyes, as she (presumably) scours the ocean for food. But to what extent do "we" look through the animal ’s eyes? To what degree does this point of view merely pretend to be an animal's, although it is clearly anthropocentric, caught in a human-made technological apparatus which, in fact, controls the (representation of the) animal? This article discusses three shark horror movies in an attempt to offer (partial) answers to the questions raised above. Of course, the shark ’s POV framed by, and filtered through, the cinematic apparatus can neither tell us what being a shark feels like, nor help us humans understand the animal. However, I will suggest that by acknowledging that animals are outside of human logic and understanding, these movies provide room for critical reflection.
Animal horror movies tap into the reservoir of affects and emotions related to animals.
and frighten” (Sipos 160). Symbolically, the monster’s crossing-over from the darkness into the light literalizes the poetics and aesthetics of transgression characteristic of the horror genre (Botting 1–13).
I
While scholars agree on the manifold meanings and diverse functions of lighting in audiovisual horror, the effects of using the killer’s point of view have caused much debate. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay on the objectification of the female body in visual culture, Jane Caputi has claimed that slasher films employ “a uniquely technical means … to encourage audience identification with the sex murderer: the point of view shot.” “Via camera style,” she continues, “all viewers are placed inside the perspective of the killer, seeing things … from his point of view” (84; italics in original). Robert Cumbow has thus accused Halloween (1978) of “mak[ing] killers … of us all,” as “the heavy breathing of Michael [Myers] becom[es] our own as we wonder what he/we will do next” (47). According to this line of argumentation, the diegetic killer inevitably embodies the audience’s
n her seminal book Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992), Carol J. Clover concludes that every good horror movie centres “on problems of vision—seeing too little (to the point of blindness) or seeing too much (to the point of insanity).” As a result, the horror genre’s “scary project is to tease, confuse, block, and threaten the spectator’s own vision” (166). Indeed, if you were asked to list five aesthetic conventions of horror movies, chances are that one of the features you would mention (provided you have seen a fair share of horror movies) is the interplay between light and darkness, while another is the killer’s point of view. The former strategy serves to confuse and surprise the audience. The monster often lurks in the shadows, hides underground, or exploits the dark veil of the night—“unseen to us until it emerges to shock
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misogynism, acting out male viewers’ sadistic desires. Clover has drawn a more complex picture of the use of the first-person perspective.¹ She acknowledges that “[p]redatory gazing through the … the first-person camera” is a key component of horror cinema, but she emphasizes that “the eye of horror works both ways. It may penetrate, but it is also penetrated” (183; 191). As Steve Neale has observed, this oscillation also plays out in Halloween, as Michael Myers (Nick Castle) is both the subject of the gaze and the object of Laurie’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) look (with which viewers are repeatedly aligned), thereby making the audience’s identification constantly shift between the victimizer and the victim. Vera Dika has added that although the killer’s point of view allows the audience to “figuratively occupy… his position within the film’s space,” viewers “remain relatively free of an identification with that character’s psychology” (36). In fact, “visual alignment,” Mathias Clasen has more recently stressed, “does not entail moral alignment or even sympathetic identification” (loc. 2464). After all, “when a subjective shot is used, it generally signifies some type of negative vision” (Galloway 46). As such, the first-person perspective is more likely to alienate viewers from than bring them closer to the murderous character whose body they virtually occupy. Halloween’s use of the first-person point of view has become iconic and set a template for how it would be used in the slasher movies of the 1980s—and in other horror sub-genres since. Notably, however, three years prior to Halloween, Jaws (1975) opened in a similar
fashion.² For the purposes of this article, the main difference between the openings of the two motion pictures is related to the question of whose point of view the camera replicates. Whereas Halloween allows viewers to see the world through the eyes of a murderous child, in Jaws, they share the perspective of a great white shark. Feminist film scholars have ignored this disparity, which becomes particularly prevalent in discussions of the slaying of Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) in the first few minutes of Jaws. For example, Peter Biskind has opined that the “shark, all too obviously, can only be the young man’s sexual passion, a greatly enlarged, marauding penis” (1). The resultant symbolic equation of shark and male desire supports John Berger’s point that “the essential relation between man and animal [is] metaphoric” (16). Indeed, in horror films, monstrous animals “first and foremost function as vehicles to conceptualize and understand the human” (Fuchs 183). Randy Malamud has thus concluded that “representations of animals in visual culture are inherently biased and self-serving,” which is why “[i]t is difficult, if not impossible, to find in these human representations an objectively true account of who animals are” (loc. 232). Yet in addition to figuring as a “stand-in for humans” (DeMello 334), fictional representations of nonhuman animals inevitably also conjure up the actual animals they depict. After all, animal imagery, Jonathan Burt has suggested, appears “less mediated” than other elements in visual culture and is thus susceptible to drawing the viewers’ attention “beyond the image and … beyond the aesthetic and semiotic framework” (Animals 11–12).
¹ In his seminal study of the “Formal Permutations of the the Point-of-View Shot” (1975), Edward Branigan differentiates between “the classic POV shot—from the subject’s eyes” and shots “from behind the subject, usually over one shoulder” (and a few other shots; 59). Alexander Galloway has likewise stressed that subjective shots and point-of-view shots are not the same. In subjective shots, “the camera shows what the actual eyes of a character would see.” “POV shots,” on the other hand, “show approximately what a character would see. … In other words, the POV shot tends to hover abstractly in space at roughly the same location of a character. But the subjective shot very precisely positions itself inside the skull of that character” (41). Since POV shots still suggest subjectivity, I employ terms generally associated with video games (both in critical and journalistic/fan discourses)—first-person perspective for what Galloway and others refer to as “subjective” and third-person perspective for any subjective viewpoint that does not try to create the illusion of looking through a character’s eyes. For relatively recent explorations of the various means of mediating subjectivity in film (and other media), see chapters six and seven in Jan- Noël Thon’s Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (2016) and Benjamin Beil’s German study First Person Perspectives: Point of View und figurenzentrierte Erzählformen im Film und im Computerspiel (2010). ² Of course, neither film inaugurated the use of the point of view shot. For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927), the audience witnesses a scene unfold through the eyes of a character believed to be the murderer.
4 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
Michael Fuchs
Even though I have just tried to disentangle animal representations from humans in terms of their semantic potentials, any representation of a nonhuman animal is, of course, mediated and accordingly enmeshed in human discourses and framed by technologies. In terms of their functions within semiotic systems, animals may hence be likened to marginalized, oppressed, and/or otherwise exploited groups of people. Similar to women, who “are simultaneously looked at and displayed,” as Mulvey claimed (11), “animals are always the observed” (Berger 27). In a close reading of Berger’s influential essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), Burt concludes that one of the essay’s strengths is the underlying notion of “the look” functioning as “an active component in the establishment of relations and not simply a matter of passive seeing or straightforward objectification” (“Why” 207). In this article, I explore this “active component” by examining the animal’s gaze, on the one hand, and the ways in which the animal body is framed and staged, on the other, in three shark horror movies: Jaws, Deep Blue Sea (1999), and Shark Night (2011). With more than three decades of technological progress between Jaws and Shark Night, the socio-cultural environment changed, the dominant cultural stance toward sharks transformed, and filmmaking evolved dramatically. Whereas Jaws combined live-action footage of actual sharks and mechanical sharks, Deep Blue Sea primarily used a mix of mechanical and digital sharks (with a handful of real-life shark scenes in-between), and Shark Night primarily employed digital effects, with animatronics used in specific scenes, with the only footage of real sharks appearing in the opening credits. As the animal’s body hence becomes increasingly enmeshed in technologies, the digital representations (or even simulations) of animals are “[n]o longer limited by the real animal” (Fudge 88). Beyond exemplifying different ways in which horror movies depict animals, the three films represent particular approaches to imagining the shark’s point of view. Whereas Jaws and Shark Night employ unaltered first-person shots to evoke the shark’s vision, Deep Blue Sea’s first-person shark shots are visually marked to convey the idea that sharks do not perceive the world in the same ways as humans do. Of course, this change in
perspective is also achieved through technology—and this will be my guiding point, for my discussion of these three movies will demonstrate how the technological apparatus frames and structures the animal’s body, its gaze, and viewers’ relation to the animal. In contrast to the primarily psychoanalytically inflected studies on the first-person perspective mentioned above, my approach will draw on affect theory, film phenomenology, and cultural animal studies. Accordingly, I am less interested here in questions of identification than embodiment and movement. “Although a camera is not human, we … experience some aspect of a camera— its angle of view, position, or way of moving, its ‘attention’ to objects—in relation to a human trait,” Edward Branigan states in Projecting a Camera (37). In other words, the camera makes human embodiment possible. However, in the films examined here, some of the most interesting implications play out in moments when the camera cuts its ties from its human anchor and when it “take[s] us beyond our own abilities” (Barker 115). In these moments, the viewers’ connection to the camera becomes post-human.
SHARKS AND SHARK VISION IN JAWS The opening of Jaws has become so iconic that it seems needless to describe the scene: the Universal logo slowly appears, accompanied by indistinct sounds. The logo fades to black as the sounds continue. The opening credits begin to roll, and the sounds are increasingly drowned by what will become the sonic signifier of the shark’s presence: the simple, yet extremely effective, two-tone shark theme. When the camera begins to take the audience on an underwater ride, four capital letters appear on the screen: “JAWS.” As the camera-slash-shark moves along, the music’s pace steadily increases, building suspense. A sudden cut disrupts this build-up of suspense and transports the audience from the first-person underwater perspective to an objective vantage point panning across a group of teenagers partying at the beach. After a few seconds, the camera focuses on Chrissie and Tom (Jonathan Filley), who leave the rest of the group. Chrissie plunges MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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Fig.1 | Something is gazing at the nude female body swimming above. Screenshot from the Jaws Blu-ray, 03:42. Universal Studios, 2012.
to represent the animal’s consciousness” (216). In this way, the “anthropomorphisation of the animal facilitates and is necessary for the representation of the animal as antagonist in the struggle between animal and human” (Gregersdotter and Hållén 209). Although this argument is convincing, I would like to suggest that the “shark POV” employed in Jaws engages viewers corporeally and endows the nonhuman with agency. As early as 1953, Julio L. Moreno noted that first-person shots create the illusion of “an actual experience presented without mediation” (344). The (virtual) first-hand, (dis)embodied experience, he continued, nullifies the “possibility of … narrative” (356). Bruce Kawin has explained that “there is a natural association between first-person discourse and first-person experience” (39). However, this link only applies to verbal discourse, for
Fig.2 | Chrissie enjoys her night swim in the ocean. Screenshot from the Jaws Blu-ray, 04:05. Universal Studios, 2012.
into the water while Tom protests, “I can swim! I just can’t walk… or undress myself.” Chrissie asks Tom to “[c]ome in the water,” but he drops to the sand and passes out. The perspective shifts to an underwater point of view, looking up at the naked body swimming in the dark (Fig. 1), accompanied by paradoxically foreboding yet simultaneously upbeat music. After a brief shift to a close-up of Chrissie above the water (Fig. 2), the ominous music from the movie’s opening moments suddenly resurfaces, indicating that someone or something is lurking beneath Chrissie, gazing at her naked figure. The camera moves closer and closer toward her nude body (Figs. 3–6), as the music’s pace subtly but steadily increases until the unknown creature strikes. Chrissie’s ensuing forty-five-second struggle for her life is primarily shot from a Steadicam, suggesting objectivity and distance—even though the camera is rather close to the action (Fig. 7). The animal’s first-person perspective, Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén have argued, “utilises the audience’s ability and (un)conscious attempts to make sense of and interpret what is shown on screen 6 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
when [the] subjective camera adopts the position of a character’s eyes and offers that as an equivalent to first-person discourse, the analogy is forced, for although visual experience is as appropriate to film expression as verbal expression is to writing, the eyes are passive organs of reception, not of expression, and it is not natural to tell by seeing. (39; italics in original) Kawin downplays vision as a passive means of decoding ocular perception here. In particular, he ignores the difference between looking and seeing in this passage. In the context of the visual relations between animals and humans, Garry Marvin has aptly noted that “[t]o see an animal suggests that the viewer is doing little more than registering the fact that the animal is present and visible” (4). The verb “look,” on the other hand, implies that the animal becomes the “focus of attention, with ‘at’ indicating a visual movement toward it” (5). This movement is a key element in Jaws, as well. In the scenes featuring the shark’s first-person point of view, the animal does not “just” see and register human bodies in the water. Rather, the fish can see them, then turns its visual attention to them, and then moves toward the bathers. Crucially, David Lulka suggests that movement “is perhaps the most illustrative and ubiquitous manifestation of agency”(87).
Michael Fuchs
As such, the shark’s motion signifies agency, as the animal moves her entire body toward human beings with an apparent intention: to prey upon the swimmers. In the diegetic world, the shark’s actions are thus “performed by” the animal “rather than happening to” it (Crist 40). Moreover, the shark does not just randomly kill anyone, as the Kintner death scene suggests. She does not simply attack the first potential victim she encounters, but rather consciously chooses one. As such, the shark “choose[s] to act in one way rather another because [she] want[s] to”— ideas connected to the expression of agency (McFarland and Hediger 5; italics in original). But this implicit acknowledgment of the shark’s agency communicates yet another idea. When the movie presents the shark’s point of view, the camera captures the shark’s movement through space in the present moment, a movement directed toward the human body on the verge of becoming-food. Importantly, the mere movement of the shark does not constitute a narrative. By circumventing “the detour and boredom of conveying a story,” identification is replaced by affect, which “is transmitted directly” (Deleuze 36). The affective response of horror experienced by the viewer transports the connection between the shark and the on-screen human from the diegetic world into the phenomenological real by inscribing the animal into the human (and vice versa) through the mediator of the cinematic apparatus. This aspect becomes particularly pertinent during the initial attack, which generates corporeal responses in viewers through “kinetic editing” (Keil and Whissel 5). As the film’s editor, Verna Fields, remarked, “What is most important is not to lose the emotional impact. If clouds don’t match or the water isn’t exactly the same color, people won’t notice if you keep the rhythm. In a film like Jaws where people are caught up in the suspense we were able to get by with a lot” (qtd. in Wright 113). Indeed, the “impact aesthetics” (King 91–116) of the attack overwhelms viewers somatically and leaves no room for reflection. When the shark looks and acts, audiences do not watch “in an active controlling sense” (Mulvey 9); instead, the audiovisual package attacks viewers by utilizing “the visceral immediacy of cinematic
Fig.3–6 | The shark approaches the female body. Screenshots from the Jaws Blu-ray, 03:56, 04:01, 04:03, 04:05. Universal Studios, 2012.
Fig.7 | The shark thrashes Chrissie from left to right. Screenshot from the Jaws Blu-ray, 04:18. Universal Studios, 2012.
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Fig.8 & 9 | Other characters constantly block Brody’s line of sight. Screenshots from the Jaws Blu-ray, 15:26; 16:09. Universal Studies, 2012.
experience” (Shaviro 36), making viewers feel the physical power and agency of the shark. To be sure, the shark per se was never present, yet her virtual presence leaves its mark on the viewers and effects “the irreversible alienation of the viewer” (46) by inscribing the nonhuman into the human. The first-person perspective in Jaws accordingly alienates viewers but simultaneously brings them closer to the beast, framed and structured by the technological apparatus. To return to the feminist readings of the scene, if the opening attack has an erotic dimension, the interpretation as a re-enactment of male sadistic urges on the passive female body oversimplifies matters, since the scene’s erotic charge implicates human and nonhuman elements alike. After all, the affects generated by motion pictures “involve[] human participations with inhuman entities—animals, machines, anything that does not reflect or affirm the dominance of the human” (MacCormack 21). This nonhuman-ness of the shark and the camera attracts viewers, as it allows them to imagine scenarios they cannot perform in their human bodies. The nonhuman assemblage hence opens up yet-unknown experiences and yet-untapped sensations “through an act of estrangement,” which expects viewers to “‘play along’ with a world that operates differently” (Bukatman 14). 8 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
In addition, the first-person perspective, combined with the camera’s inability to capture the shark for a long period of time, enhances the fish’s effective invisibility. In the minutes leading up to the shark’s second kill, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and his family, along with friends and hundreds of vacationers and islanders, are at the beach. After introducing Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees), the camera focuses on Brody, sitting in a folding chair, anxiously staring at the water and expecting the shark to strike any moment. Yet, people are swimming, playing with their dogs, doing the things people do at the beach. When the camera assumes Brody’s point of view, his line of sight is constantly blocked. As one of Brody’s acquaintances literally gets in his face, the subtext concerning vision comes to the visual foreground, as the man occupies about half the frame when a young woman starts screaming in the water (Fig. 8). Brody fears it may be a shark attack, but a young man is merely touching her beneath the water’s surface. Seconds later, a group of children goes into the water. Another man approaches Brody and distracts him, a distraction again highlighted by the man’s dominance of the frame (Fig. 9). The ominous music sounds as the perspective switches to a first-person point of view beneath the ocean’s surface, manoeuvring between the children’s legs. The “shark cam” closes in on Alex, who is swimming on an inflatable mattress, some feet from the other kids. When the shark strikes, the camera switches to a third-person perspective. Cut to the beach, where people are rising to their feet, wondering, “Did you see this?” The camera zooms in on Brody’s face and then returns to the children in the water, now surrounded by blood—panic breaks out. The question “Did you see this?” verbally draws attention to the topic of sight and vision played out in this scene. Although Brody wants to keep a close eye on the water, other characters constantly obstruct his line of vision, and when the shark attacks Alex, Ellen tries to relax her husband by massaging his shoulders, further distracting him (not that he could have done anything). In addition, visual proof of the shark’s presence is, in fact, sparse, if not altogether lacking. The man wondering, “Did you see this?” highlights the audience’s (and the
Michael Fuchs
Fig.10 | When you know what you are looking for, you may be able to identify the shark’s snout in the background. Screenshot from the Jaws Blu-ray , 17:11. Universal Studios, 2012.
beachgoers’) inability to, in fact, see the culprit (Fig. 10). What the audience (and, to a lesser degree, the people at the beach) can see is Alex gulping water and his own blood while screaming in pain before being dragged underwater. Even if a shark attack is the “logical” conclusion, the audience cannot see the animal—it escapes human sight. The shark remains practically invisible even if viewers share its point of view.
Fig.11 | In Deep Blue Sea, the sharks are on full display. Screenshot from the Deep Blue Sea Blu-ray, 07:24. Warner Bros., 2010.
SHARKS AND SHARK VISION IN DEEP BLUE SEA Produced nearly a quarter-century after Jaws, Deep Blue Sea’s approach to sharks is in many respects the polar opposite of Jaws. As director Renny Harlin stresses in a behind-the-scenes feature included in the Blu-ray, “My whole approach to this movie was no more hiding sharks. This time you’re really gonna see them.” As he adds, “You can look at it swimming, circling around, coming to you, biting you.” These soundbites testify to Harlin’s focus on the visual presence of the sharks—an idea he could realize thanks to the radical advancements in digital technology in the 1990s. Whereas Spielberg’s team struggled with a relatively low budget and the mechanical model of a shark, Deep Blue Sea’s creators had the benefit of technologies that allowed them to insert digital sharks whenever needed. However, Harlin’s direct
address of the audience (“biting you”) implies a level of immediacy that the movie, in fact, undermines through its visual language. Deep Blue Sea follows the template of a mad scientist tale garnished with a critique of capitalism. Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) finances a research project with the aim of obtaining a cure for Alzheimer’s disease from the brain tissue of sharks. Since “[t]heir brains [a]ren’t large enough to harvest sufficient amounts of the protein complex,” the project’s directors—more interested in the end result than the implications of their measures— decide to genetically manipulate the sharks in order to increase their brain size. However, the process ultimately increases not only their brain size (and intellectual MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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capacity), but also their body size. When Franklin visits the facility, a thunderstorm hits the research station, and chaos ensues, as the three sharks kill eight people within a few hours before three of the humans succeed in stopping the sharks from escaping into the open water. In the opening scene, a sailboat floats in the open water. After a brief bird eye’s view onto the ship, the audience is taken to an underwater perspective that peeks upward at the boat (Fig. 12). A cut transports viewers to the action aboard the ship, where a man and a woman are making out. Another cut to below the surface, but this time, the point of view is different. The camera assumes a first-person perspective, as the camera movement suggests that something manoeuvres through the water. The point of view is clearly nonhuman, as a fisheye lenslike filter adds the illusion of different levels of focus, with a round area in the middle of the screen functioning as a kind of crosshairs (Fig. 13). A few moments later, a gigantic mako shark breaks through the hull and all four people stumble into the water. As the shark closes in on its potential prey (seen from the shark’s perspective), it is surprisingly hit by a harpoon and consequently guided back to the research station. The shark’s point of view is clearly marked in Deep Blue Sea, as the movie visually differentiates between third-person underwater shots and moments that are seen through one of the sharks’ eyes. Of course, any point of view shot in film re-frames and structures the subject’s perspective and its vision, as the cinematic image can only approximate—and not truly capture—a living being’s vision (humans included). However, differentiating between the shark’s and the human’s point of view underlines that these species do not perceive (let alone understand) the world in the same way. The visual emphasis on this “abyss of non-comprehension” (Berger 13) highlights the sharks’ difference from humans. Unlike humans, who are rational creatures, sharks, the movie suggests, are driven by the primal urge to feed—even if humans supercharge their cognitive abilities. Similar to Jaws, the shark’s urge to kill re-integrates humans into the “natural” food chain, as they find themselves in the uncomfortable position of no longer being the top dogs. 10 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
Although there are some similarities in terms of how Deep Blue Sea and Jaws represent the shark’s active and agential engagement with the human (reduced to a source of protein), in other ways, there are clear differences between the two films. In particular, the sheer visual omnipresence of Deep Blue Sea’s sharks ensures that they occupy the centre of visual attention. At the same time, however, actual sharks are entirely absent from the story and were absent from the film’s production. This non-presence of sharks draws attention to the spectral and simulacral character of the creatures encountered through the cinematic apparatus. In the making-of, Harlin explains, “The footage of the live sharks will be cut together with scenes that will sometimes be …
Re-integrated into the “natural” food chain, humans find themselves in the uncomfortable position of no longer being the top dogs.
Fig.12 | Something is looking up at the boat. Screenshot from the Deep Blue Sea Blu-ray, 00:45. Warner Bros., 2010.
Fig.13 | Deep Blue Sea visually marks the shark’s POV. Screenshot from the Deep Blue Sea Blu-ray, 03:30. Warner Bros., 2010.
Michael Fuchs
Fig.14 | The late Roger Ebert characterized Deep Blue Sea's sharks as "cartoons." Screenshot from the Deep Blue Sea Blu-ray, 09:09. Warner Bros., 2010.
mechanical sharks, sometimes digitally generated sharks. Our goal is … to have a seamless story where you will never be able to tell whether you are dealing with real sharks or something that movie magic has created. We definitely put the actors into contact with the real sharks.” Special effects designer Walt Conti echoes the emphasis on the “real” contact with sharks, noting, “There are a lot of times the actors aren’t acting; they’re reacting. Having an 8,000-pound shark thrashing and throwing water at you—that’s not faking it; that’s like the real thing.” On the one hand, these remarks anchor the animals seen on the screen in material reality. On the other hand, however, the “8,000-pound shark” the actors and actresses were in direct contact with was not an actual shark, but a human-made and inanimate stand-in for a shark. In fact, both Harlin’s wording and Conti’s expression, “that’s like the real thing” (my emphasis), show an awareness of how this attention to authenticity is effectively for naught, as the question of “what is real and what is not” can no longer be satisfyingly answered. Even twenty years ago, few viewers would have mistaken the sharks featured in Deep Blue Sea for actual sharks (Fig. 14). Indeed, the late Roger Ebert noted that “some of the sharks look like cartoons” (para. 8), while Dustin Putman commented that “the mechanical [sharks] are more plausible than the CGI ones” (para. 6). Accepting a clear-cut differentiation between what is
Deep Blue Sea marks the shark’s point of view by visually differentiating between thirdperson underwater shots and moments seen through one of the sharks’ eyes. believed to be real and what is considered artifice runs the danger of being overly simplistic, as “what is real isn’t so categorical” (Thompson 49). Jean Baudrillard suggested that the media-saturated postmodern world is characterized by “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (Simulacra 1). Thus, real sharks are no longer at stake. Only their representations are, as real sharks have, in fact, been absorbed by their representations, and representations of sharks only refer to other representations to the point that the “original” has ceased to exist. Hence, it seems appropriate that Deep Blue Sea’s sharks are not “simply” representations. They were largely generated by a computer, made of code, created by a seemingly simple sequence of 0s and 1s that took a representation of a shark as its model—signs (the digital sharks) made up of signs (the code) made up of
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signs (representations of sharks). The “animals” viewers encounter through the cinematic apparatus are thus so far removed from material reality (and, indeed, have come to replace physical reality) that any discussion of the animal as animal “is to retreat into some kind of hinterland of philosophy that is always already false” (Fudge 59–60). In this hyperreal environment, digital animals such as Deep Blue Sea’s sharks “are excessive forces of nature” (Whissel 96). I appropriate Kirsten Whissel’s phrase here, meaning it to convey two ideas. First, the digital sharks are both physically and cognitively superior to their referents in nature. Second, the digital sharks epitomize the perceived “excess” of animal life on our planet, which increasingly reaches its limits. The concomitant second life of nature in computer databases and people’s minds has resulted in its usurpation by its (digital) representations, an idea that Deep Blue Sea hammers home by featuring genetically modified sharks as the film’s monsters. The film’s submersion in intertextuality and self-awareness both highlights and reinforces this process. Indeed, not only does the movie irreverently incorporate the Jaws movies into its voracious textual body, but its characters liken their fates to movies so excessively that they seem aware of their existence as pieces of fiction, thereby creating a hyperreality in which the differences between fiction and (diegetic) reality disappear. This notion of being a creative product of humans—a character—becomes manifest in the visually marked shots representing the shark’s point of view. Whereas, on one level, the deviation from traditional point-of-view shots serves to alienate viewers from the subject whose point of view they share, on another level, it highlights how the sharks are imbricated in the technological apparatus. In this respect, they are not so different from the human beings encountered in the diegetic world. Tellingly, the most meta-aware of the characters, the African-American cook Preacher (LL Cool J), concludes at one point that he is “done! Brothers never make it out of situations like this!” As Preacher comes to see his life as a re-enactment of a standard horror movie plot, his words make explicit how various processes in the diegetic reality “substitut[e] the signs of the real for the real, … deterring every real process via its operational double” (Baudrillard, Simulacra 2). 12 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
These developments lead to an “excess of reality,” which creates “an artificial world that expels [human beings] from it” (Baudrillard, “On Disappearance” 25). Yet this expulsion from the world and attendant banishment into the world of signs concerns human beings and other animals alike. The resulting ontological nebulosity surrounding Deep Blue Sea’s sharks has, however, yet another effect. The movie’s sharks were, quite literally, animated by digital technologies. Because of their animated character, digital monsters “exist[] in a dialectical relationship with death,” for “they seem most lifelike when their deadliness and mortality are on display” (Whissel 99). Whereas Whissel primarily discusses digital monsters as an example of “a cinematic visual effect that operates as a site of intense signification and gives stunning (and sometimes) allegorical expression to a film’s key themes, anxieties, and conceptual obsessions” (6), the mortality she diagnoses evokes ideas surrounding animals’ disappearance from material reality. In particular, Akira Mizuta Lippit has suggested that animals have “found a proper habitat … in the recording devices of the technological media,” which “allowed modern culture to preserve animals” (25). Visually marking the shark’s point of view thus functions as a reminder of how the animal (and its implied agency) is a mere specter. And even though the explicit differentiation between the human and animal perspectives in Deep Blue Sea may have been intended to highlight the animal other “as an unknowable other” (Lippit 6), it opens up another potential meaning. Animals’ “instinctive, almost telepathic communication,” Lippit has argued, “put[s] into question the primacy of human language and consciousness as optimal modes of communication” (2). But if this subversive potential is contained within the man-made technological apparatus, its potency is, likewise, harnessed.
SHARKS AND SHARK VISION IN SHARK NIGHT Produced a decade after Deep Blue Sea and featuring shark special effects by Walt Conti, the same man who was responsible for the effects in the 1999 movie, Shark Night follows a group of Tulane undergrads who are
Michael Fuchs
Fig.15 | A shark’s point of view in Shark Night. Screenshot from the 2D Shark Night Blu-ray, 32:37. Rogue, 2012.
about to spend a weekend at a vacation home by a lake somewhere in Louisiana. According to the generic script, different shark species kill off the college students one by one, with the final girl and her potential mate (and her dog) surviving. Shark Night draws on animal horror’s convention of sealing off the artificial world of humans from the natural environment inhabited by animals by emphasizing the ways in which human beings intervene in natural processes. The lake, as one of the characters remarks, “is a saltwater lake,” which “means it’s not impossible” for a shark to live there. Another character adds that a shark may have “c[o]me out of the Gulf, flooded up over the interstate, wound up here, got comfortable, and made a home.” However, neither nature’s design nor pure chance led the sharks into the lake. Rather, a group of men living by the lake concluded that since Shark Week has been such a phenomenal success, there is a market niche not served by the current offerings: people who “wanna watch the real hardcore shit you can’t get on basic cable.” Thus, whereas the movie at first hints at a “natural” cause that might have led the sharks into human habitat, making the animals the aggressors who transgressed the borderline between
The sheer visual omnipresence of Deep Blue Sea’s sharks draws attention to the spectral and simulacral character of the creatures encountered through the cinematic apparatus. nonhuman and human worlds, it was human beings who intervened in nature. In this way, Shark Night “rel[ies] on and simultaneously subvert[s] and re-inscribe[s] the basic conceptual separation of the human and non-human animal” (Gregersdotter, Hållén, and Höglund 5). This intervention in nature becomes closely interconnected with the sharks’ first-person perspective in the movie. Shark Night lures viewers into thinking that specific underwater shots depict the sharks’ points of view (Fig. 15). However, as the narrative unfolds, the audience comes to understand that in order to film “the real hardcore shit,” the rednecks mounted MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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cameras on the sharks (Fig. 16). As Donna Haraway has remarked, such a connection between technology and the animal’s body has far-reaching implications: “The camera is both physical ‘high technology’ and immaterial channel to the interior reaches of another. Through the camera’s eye glued, literally, to the body of the other, we are promised the full sensory experience of the critters themselves, without the curse of having to remain human” (252). Thus, the camera violently used as an extension of the animal’s body promises “[i]mmediate experience of otherness, inhabitation of the other as a new self, sensation and truth in one package without the pollution of interfering or interacting” (Haraway 252). However, rather than attempting to mediate the sharks’ experiences, Shark Night’s subjective shots function as a vehicle to create spectacle. As a result, the technology the characters employ in order to show the shark’s point of view does not fulfill its promise. The camera attached to the shark’s body cannot show, let alone tell, viewers what being a shark entails. Still, the scenario played out in Shark Night allows viewers to understand the complex interrelations between technology and the depiction of the animal’s body. Significantly, these technological infoldings of the flesh concern animal and human alike. When viewers are first introduced to the main male characters, they are playing a multiplayer round of Halo: Reach (2010). Before the camera focuses on the characters that will be of significance to the rest of the story, viewers can see the mere virtual presences of unimportant tertiary characters on monitors adjacent to the screen the video game is played on (Fig. 17). The configuration of the image, dominated by screens displaying digital and digitized content and the virtual presences of other human beings constantly surveyed by digital technologies, highlights not only the interconnections of the material body and its virtual doubles, but also the omnipresence of cameras and other technologies observing our everyday actions. In an article on the transmedia documentary Bear 71 (2012), Anat Pick concludes that the combination of subjective shots and the interactional dimension offered by the website “bind human and nonhuman in an age 14 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
Fig.16 | A video camera is removed from a hammerhead shark's belly. Screenshot from the 2D Shark Night Blu-ray, 54:15. Rogue, 2012.
Fig.17 | Shark Night visually highlights human beings’ entanglements in media networks. Screenshot from the 2D Shark Night Blu-ray, 06:14. Rogue, 2012.
Rather than attempting to mediate the sharks’ experience, Shark Night’s subjective shots create spectacle. of mass surveillance” (para. 44). Even without the affordances of new media, Shark Night accomplishes a similar feat, as the movie’s point-of-view shots demolish the wall separating humans from animals. However, the horror film does not facilitate identification with the animal, nor imagine what being a shark would feel like; rather, Shark Night’s way of bringing humans closer to animals is by highlighting the ways in which humans and animals alike are constantly under surveillance in the early twenty-first century. But the movie presents another likeness between the two species: mankind’s out-of-control use of technology becomes akin to the shark’s need for nourishment. While Deep Blue Sea
Michael Fuchs
narrates a classic “technology gone wrong”-tale, in Shark Night, technology is controlled and deliberately used by human beings to prey on others—human and nonhuman animals alike. However, nature—embodied by the sharks—eludes human control. On the one hand, Shark Night thus suggests that the human fantasy of controlling and subduing nature is precarious. On the other hand, by explicitly interweaving nature and technology, the movie points out that the control of technology is, likewise, a mere illusion. In the end, Shark Night illustrates mankind’s growing awareness that “the world we are making through our own choices and inventions is a world that neutralizes [any] meaningful link[s] between action and consequence” (Allenby and Sarewitz 64–65).
THE FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE IN SHARK HORROR In one of the first scholarly discussions of animal horror movies, Elisa Aaltola suggests that [t]he monster lacks all personality and its motives are nonexistent. It becomes known only through its body and aggressive actions: it is constructed as an acting body. Otherwise it remains hidden, causing fear with its invisibility and absence. This goes well together with the idea that the animal is the opposite of humans—where as [sic] the humans in the films are intentional, rational and moral heroes[,] the animal remains an instinctually violent body that is unseen, unknown—and frightening. (para. 2)
bruised, scarred, terrified, made to faint, and stabbed to death,” (Clover 175) the animals in these movie look— and strike— back. They bring along terror and death. The shark is thus far from a passive object of representation. Indeed, “the animal has tended to disrupt the smooth unfolding of Enlightenment ideology. Defined as that bit of nature endowed with voluntary motion, the animal resists the imperialist desire to represent the natural … terrain … as a passive object or a blank slate ready for mapping by Western experts” (Armstrong 415). Ironically, the challenge of human supremacy eventually always leads to the animal’s demise. However, the momentary uproars against human dominance prove significant. In her book on “narrating across species lines,” Susan McHugh suggests that “the success of the novel form follows … from its usefulness for experiments with multiple perspectives and processes that support models centered on agency rather than subjectivity, reflecting as well as influencing ongoing social changes” (1). Similarly, especially Jaws and Deep Blue Sea emphasize the shark’s experiential agency—they traverse the sea with a clear purpose. At the same time, however, Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, and Shark Night all demonstrate that the animal’s agency is to a large extent determined by the technological apparatus—and in this respect, these real, mechanical, and digital sharks are very much like us. In this way, these seemingly simplistic animal horror movies turn the “singular, indivisible line” humans have erected in order to celebrate their exceptionalist status on this planet into a “multiple and heterogeneous border” that cannot be maintained so easily (Derrida 399).
This lack of motive in combination with their apparent otherness from human beings has made anthropophagic sharks “unanthropomorphisable” (Quirke 6). However, in the movies discussed in this essay, viewers share the shark’s point of view and thus, quite literally, get closer to the beast. The shark’s point of view actively explores its environment, always looking for the next piece of food. In this way, rather than “gazing reactively,” which is “figured as an experience of being MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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WORKS CITED Aaltola, Elisa. “Animal Monsters and the Fear of the Wild.” M/C Journal: The Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, journal.media-culture. org.au/0203/animals.php. Accessed 15 May 2018. Allenby, Braden R., and Daniel Sarewitz. The TechnoHuman Condition. MIT P, 2011. Armstrong, Philip. “The Postcolonial Animal.” Society and Animals, vol. 10, no. 4, 2002, pp. 413–419. Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. U of California P, 2009. Baudrillard, Jean. “On Disappearance.” Translated by Chris Turner. Fatal Theories, edited by David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin, and Richard G. Smith. Routledge, 2008, pp. 24–29. ---. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U of Michigan P, 1993. Beil, Benjamin. First Person Perspectives: Point of View und figurenzentrierte Erzählformen im Film und im Computerspiel. LIT, 2010. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” Why Look at Animals. Penguin, 2009, pp. 12–31. Biskind, Peter. “Jaws: Between the Teeth.” Jump Cut, no. 9, 1975, pp. 1 and 26. Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Branigan, Edward. “Formal Permutations of the Pointof-View Shot.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 54–64. ---. Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory. Routledge, 2006. Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. U of California P, 2012. Burt, Jonathan. Animals in Film. Reaktion Books, 2002. ---. “John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’: A Close Reading.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 203–218. Caputi, Jane. The Age of Sex Crime. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford UP, 2017. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992
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Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Temple UP, 1999. Cumbow, Robert C. Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter. 2nd Ed. Scarecrow P, 2000. Deep Blue Sea. Directed by Renny Harlin, performances by Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane, LL Cool J, Samuel L. Jackson, Jacqueline McKenzie, et al. Warner Bros., 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Continuum, 2003. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human–Animal Studies. Columbia UP, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, 369–418. Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990. Ebert, Roger. “Review of Deep Blue Sea.” RogerEbert. com, 28 July 1999, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ deep-blue-sea-1999. Accessed 30 July 2018. Fuchs, Michael. “‘What if Nature Were Trying to Get Back at Us?’: Animals as Agents of Nature’s Revenge in Horror Cinema.” American Revenge Narratives: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Kyle Wiggins. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 177–206. Fudge, Erica. Animal. Reaktion, 2002. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Gregersdotter, Katarina, and Nicklas Hållén. “Anthropomorphism and the Representation of Animals as Adversaries.” Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism, edited by Katarina Gregersdotter, Nicklas Hållén, and Johan Höglund. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 206–23. ---, ---, and Johan Höglund. “Introduction.” Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism, edited by Katarina Gregersdotter, Nicklas Hållén, and Johan Höglund. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 1–18.
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Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter, performances by Jamie Lee Curtis, Tony Moran, Donald Pleasance, et al. Columbia Pictures, 1978. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg, performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, et al. Universal Pictures, 1975. Kawin, Bruce. “An Outline of Film Voices.” Film Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 1984–85, pp. 38–46. Keil, Charlie, and Kristen Whissel. “Introduction.”
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 1975, pp. 6–18. Neale, Steve. “Halloween: Suspense, Aggression and the Look.” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Scarecrow P, 1984, pp. 331–345. Pick, Anat. “Why Not Look at Animals?” NECSUS: The European Journal of Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015, www.necsus-ejms.org/why-not-look-atanimals/. Accessed May 15, 2018. Putman, Dustin. “Review of Deep Blue Sea (1999).” TheFilmFile, 29 July 1999, www.thefilmfile.com/
Editing and Special/Visual Effects, edited by Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel. Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 1–21. King, Geoff. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. I. B. Tauris, 2000. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. U of Minnesota P, 2000. Lulka, David. “Consuming Timothy Treadwell: Redefining Nonhuman Agency in Light of Herzog’s Grizzly Man.” Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, edited by Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger. Brill, 2009, pp. 67–87. MacCormack, Patricia. Cinesexuality. Ashgate, 2008. Malamud, Randy. An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kindle edition. Marvin, Garry. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Seeing, Looking, Watching, Observing Nonhuman Animals.” Society and Animals, vol. 13, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–11. McFarland, Sarah E., and Ryan Hediger. “Approaching the Agency of Other Animals: An Introduction.” Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, edited by Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger. Brill, 2009, pp. 1–20. McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Moreno, Julio L. “Subjective Cinema: And the Problem of Film in the First Person.” The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 7, no. 4, 1953, pp. 341– 358.
reviews/d/99_deepbluesea.htm. Accessed 30 July 2018. Quirke, Antonia. Jaws. BFI, 2002. Shark Night. Directed by David R. Ellis, performances by Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack, Sinqua Walls, Alyssa Diaz, et al. Rogue, 2011. The Sharks of the Deep Blue Sea. Directed by Michael Meadows, performances by Renny Harlin, Samuel L. Jackson, Alan Riche, Walt Conti, Jacqueline McKenzie, et al. Warner Bros., 1999. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. U of Minnesota P, 1993. Sipos, Thomas M. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. McFarland, 2010. Thompson, M. Guy. The Truth about Freud’s Technique: The Encounter with the Real. New York UP, 1994. Thon, Jan-Noël. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. U of Nebraska P, 2016. When Sharks Attack: The Making of Deep Blue Sea. Directed by Michael Meadows, performances by Renny Harlin, Samuel L. Jackson, Thomas Jane, LL Cool J, Saffron Burrows, et al. Warner Bros., 1999. Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Duke UP, 2014. Wright, Benjamin. “The Auteur Renaissance, 1968– 1980: Editing.” Editing and Special/Visual Effects, edited by Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel. Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 103–115.
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Donato Loia
The Multiplicity of a Still: Considerations of a Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker BY DONATO LOIA | The University of Texas at Austin
ABSTRACT Three figures stare at us standing at the centre of the cinematic image. The shape of the screen is metaphorically doubled by the frame of a crumbling architectural aperture. Behind the figures, a patchy wall obscures the horizon. In the "space-in-between" the figures and the material limit of the screen where the filmic image is projected, rain showers down on the ground. In this paper, I will investigate the metaphorical dimension of a still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker without considering the overall narrative of the movie. In particular, I will reflect on the still’s different levels of multiplicity and their possible significance while looking at the structural and compositional strategy of this image. Building on Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia,” Roland Barthes's and Laura Mulvey's reflections on still's ontological status, and Robert Bird's previous studies on the Russian director, I will propose the articulation of an "ethics of spaces-in-between," intersubjective and dialogical in its dimensions.
“Once halted, returned and repeated, iconography and topography are easily identified and the scene’s integral structure of symmetry and opposition acquires an aesthetic cinematic significance of its own.” — Laura Mulvey
INTRODUCTION
T
hree figures fr amed by an architectural aperture are looking in our direction from the centre of a cinematic image (Fig. 1). One figure’s head is turned slightly to the left, probably awakened by the appearance of the rain. Detached from the filmic continuum, the figures’ feelings are hardly identifiable. Their facial expressions are not legible enough, and
their postures only indicate an overall sense of tiredness. On the floor, vaguely triangular shapes are created by the characters’ legs. Their arms, hidden by the rest of their bodies, are almost invisible. A flash of light draws an arch on the upper part of their heads. The arch takes the momentary shape of halos suspended on their darkened faces. Behind them, a patchy wall obscures the horizon and abruptly interrupts the deep perspectival focus of the image. In a metaphorical “space-in-between” the figures and the viewers that comprise the audience, rain falls to the ground.¹ The three figures are spatially separated from the spectacle of the rain, which comes down in large quantities in front of their eyes. The rain catches the light and illuminates the paved area, partially abstracting the ordinariness of the tiles.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: The first version of this essay was presented during the 26th Annual “Crossing the Boundaries Conference” organized by the Art History Graduate Student Union at Binghamton University in March 2018. I am grateful to faculty members Jeffrey Kirkwood, John Tagg, and Julia Walker, and to the graduate students Mariah Postlewait and Pei-Chun Hsieh for the comments and questions I received during the conference. Thanks also to Lisa Gulesserian, Josh Abraham Kopin, Stefano Francia di Celle, and Vincenzo Mattia Basso for their helpful suggestions. Special thanks, too, to Mark Doroba and the Visual Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the anonymous reviewers for Mise-en-Scène, Editor-in-Chief Greg Chan, and Advisory Member Kelly Ann Doyle for their editorial assistance. ¹ I am indebted for the expression “space-in-between” (spazio intermedio) and its application to the study of cinema to the philosopher Pietro Montani. More precisely, Montani refers to an “ethics of the spaces in-between” through the analyses of a number of modern movies and reflections on the possibilities to “authenticate” an event and contingency at large. In my analysis I re-adopt Montani’s expression “space-in-between” for its reference to the intersection of fiction and reality. For a discussion of the “ethics of the spaces in-between” see Montani, Pietro. L’Immaginazione Intermediale, Laterza, 2010, pp. 35-37.
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The Multiplicity of a Still
Fig.1 | Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, still, Mosfilm, 1979. 02:21:32.
The rounded tiles, which rise behind the water, create a repeated pattern which disappears at the centre and at the margins of the image. The figures at the centre of the cinematic image, as much as the viewer outside of the still, remain in a state of suspension.
a broader analysis of the “still” in and of itself. That said, the goal here is not to provide a “general theory of the still,” but to offer preliminary remarks on its ontological status.
In this text, I investigate the structural and plural dimensions of the still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) described briefly above, without considering the overall narrative of the f ilm. A distinctive proliferation of “screens” characterizes Tarkovsky’s polysemous still. Such multiplicity of “screens” has important consequences for the conversationa l engagement between spectator and characters, and more broadly, for the interrelation of fiction and reality. Finally, it would be impossible to completely separate the analysis of this particular image from
THE FIRST LEVEL OF MULTIPLICITY
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With my initial description, I wanted to scratch the surface of the communicative level of Tarkovsky’s still. Now, I would like to move beyond the strictly informative quality of the image and attempt some ref lections on its structural qualities. Tarkovsky’s still, like every film still, tacitly participates in a multiplicity. It is obvious that insofar as it is a part of the filmic continuum as well as an isolated fragment, the still is assumed to be viewed by someone. Although
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the relation between an image and its beholder is a sophisticated matter, and artists have found many ways over the course of history to neutralize or even negate the beholder’s presence, images, in principle, seem to depend upon consciousness.² It would be hard to count the number of digital images buried in data centres and abandoned to an existence without viewers. However, even those abandoned images implied the gaze of someone else’s eyes at some point of their existence. In this sense, even an invisible image hints at some degree of visibility. Literary critic and art historian W. J. T. Mitchell summarizes these aspects of viewability and consciousness with incisive words: “[i]f there were no minds, there would be no more images, mental or material” (17). For if all human consciousness were to be annihilated, the physical world, we tend to assume, would continue to exist quite nicely. At the same time, as Mitchell also clarifies: “[t]he world may not depend upon consciousness but images in (not to mention of ) the world clearly do” (17). In this rather obvious initial sense, Tarkovsky’s still depends upon something outside itself: a multiplicity of eyes and perceptive consciousness.
The figures at the centre of the cinematic image, as much as the viewer outside of the still, remain in a state of suspension. Barthes means something that exceeds the immediate level of signification of the image: a supplement of meaning that the intellect of the viewer cannot succeed in fully absorbing, or in Barthes’s notable terms, to “a signifier without signified.”⁵ These three levels of meaning can be separated, but they also coexist in the filmic image. My analysis concerns itself only with the superficial and the structural dimension of the still. At the same time, these two dimensions are inhabited by “informational,” “obvious,” and “obtuse” levels of significance, hence my reference to Barthes’s famous distinction.⁶ What I have considered so far—the obvious reference of a still to a multiplicity of eyes and active perceptive consciousness—are rather self-evident aspects
With reference to an “obvious” level of multiplicity, I am freely drawing on and readapting a famous distinction by Roland Barthes on the three levels of meaning of a filmic image: the “informational,” the “obvious,” and the “obtuse” meaning.³ By “informational,” Barthes refers to the most immediate level of communication of the image, such as the settings, the costumes, the characters, and their insertion into a narration. By “obvious,” he indicates a more symbolic significance, such as the shower of gold over the young czar’s head in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, a reference to his wealth and power.⁴ Finally, by “obtuse,”
Fig.2 | Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, detail of the architectural frame, still, Mosfilm, May 1979. 02:21:32.
² For an historical study of paintings grounded in the concept of the “beholder’s nonexistence,” see Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of California Press, 1980. ³ For a broader discussion of these three meanings see Roland Barthes's. “The Third Meaning. Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills.” Image. Music. Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heat, Fontana Press, 1977, pp. 52-68. ⁴ Ivan the Terrible. Directed and Produced by Sergei Eisenstein, 1944. ⁵ Barthes, p. 61. ⁶ In Barthesian terms, the “obvious” level of significance of an image depends upon the viewer’s ability to decipher its symbolic meaning. The “obvious” meaning requires an active viewer capable to correlate the image’s visuality to its symbolic significance. However, in this essay I employ the term “obvious” in a more minimal sense and without reference to any conventional system of symbolic signifiers.
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that would apply to many other visual examples. To explore less-obvious levels of multiplicity, I consider the architectural frame and its structural implications in the poetic logic of this image (Fig. 2). Not only does the crumbling architectural aperture frame the figures at the centre of the image, but it also metaphorically doubles the movie screen. With this architectural “doubled screen,” Tarkovsky ref lects on the concept of artistic creativity as a construction that exhibits itself.⁷ The metaphoric doubling of the screen reveals Tarkovsky’s exploration of the cinematic: his acknowledgment of the hidden presence of the filmic system of representation. A similar argument has already been noted by film and literature scholar Robert Bird in contrast to what literary critic Fredric Jameson has previously contended about the Russian cineaste: “[[t]he deepest contradiction in Tarkovsky]— says Jameson—is ‘a valorization of nature without human technology achieved by the highest technology of the photographic apparatus itself. No ref lexivity acknowledges this second hidden presence’” (12). On the contrary, as I am pointing out with my visual example and as I will further discuss, Tarkovsky redirects our attention precisely toward this “second hidden presence” (12). The architectural frame moves beyond its own visual specificity in order to redirect our attention towards the exploration of the cinematic and the image as artifice.⁸ Tarkovsky’s cinematic strategy reminds us here of what cultural theorist Stuart Hall clarifies: “[r]epresentation works as much through what is not shown, as through what is” (59). Tarkovsky’s still implicitly acknowledges the hidden presence of the material screen (what is not shown) through the architectural aperture (that is, through what is shown).
In principle, the filmic always negates the materiality of the screen through the f lux of images, its narrative qualities, and the viewer’s emotional absorption. However, the fixed materiality of the screen can be revealed by the filmic’s ability to refer to itself and to its constructed qualities, and if the viewer decides to enter into a state of conscious dialogue with the projected image.⁹ Tarkovsky’s reflexive analysis of filmic representation has not gone unnoticed. Robert Bird has already commented on Tarkovsky’s cinematic exploration in his analysis of another still from the first episode in Andrei Rublev, “The Jester”¹⁰ (Fig. 3). As Bird notes, through this image Tarkovsky proposes “a mediation on filmic vision […] First there is the Tarkovskian rain, which falls in sheets in front of the camera while the three monks jog along in the background [while we watch them] through a window that matches the proportions of the screen” (76-77). Fascinating correspondences exist between the still from Stalker that I am discussing and Bird’s example: the “Tarkovskian rain,” the presence of three figures, and the doubling of the screen as a reflection on the cinematic. However, there are also distinctive differences between these stills: in the one
Moving closer to our time, it would be hard to count the number of digital images buried in some data centres and abandoned to an existence without viewers.
⁷ For a similar interpretation of “artistic creativity” see Emilio Garroni's Ricognizione della Semiotica, Officina, 1977, p. 103. ⁸ For a discussion of the concept of “image-artifice” see Francesco Casetti's Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, translated by Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo, Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 107. ⁹ In other terms, the filmic negates the materiality of the screen only “in principle,” that is, if we consider the filmic in itself and its experience in itself. At the same time, it is probably true that there is really no such thing as the filmic unconditioned by experience. As art historian Richard Shiff notes: “[...] a differential or ‘critical’ term loses its efficacy when regarded as an absolute that ‘always’ applies, that is, when we designate it as the correct term under all conditions, rather than as the more beneficial term under specified conditions” (22). For a problematization of the use of generalizations in theoretical discussions see Richard Shiff's Doubt, Routledge, 2007, pp. 19-26. ¹⁰ Andrei Rublev. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, Mosfilm,1966.
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Fig.3 | Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev, still, Mosfilm, December 1966. 00:08:49.
from Andrei Rublev, the experience of the viewer is that of the voyeur, while the still also resembles the canonical Albertian paradigm of the window on the world.¹¹ By contrast, the still from Stalker makes the viewer experience the double condition of simultaneously being both voyeur and voyant; seeing and metaphorically being seen. In particular, the centredness of the three figures, their seated positions, and their act of looking at the rain and beyond the rain creates a distinctive feeling of specular closeness for the viewer and a conversational quality within the image.¹² The multiplicity of the still in Stalker is the result of the tension between this image as something constructed and something contingent. The still is about the cinematic, the characters framed by the architecture, the autonomous dimension of the filmic—in sum, about representation as a constructed language—as much as it claims, invokes, and evokes the presence and space
of the viewer. That is, a non-autonomous dimension. Tarkovsky’s architectural frame makes something else appear: the material screen which, during the time of the filmic representation, tends to disappear behind the projected images.¹³ The first level of multiplicity of the still lies in this multiplication of “screens.” As we will see, however, this multiplication does not cease at the architectural frame.
THE SECOND LEVEL OF MULTIPLICITY: THE SPACE-IN-BETWEEN Before commenting further on the proliferation of “screens,” I would like to consider that particular “space” that appears to have opened between the architectural frame and the space of the audience. The metaphorical doubling of the screen through the architectural frame opens up a “space-in-between” the architectural “screen”
¹¹ The Albertian paradigm is well known and it refers to the picture plane as an “open window” through which the object of vision is seen by an external viewer located in a mechanically fixed position. For a brief summary of the Albertian paradigm see Anne Friedberg's The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, MIT Press, 2006. ¹² For a further discussion of the shift in Tarkovsky’s Stalker in a more “conversational” and “theatrical” direction see Evgeny Tsymbal's Sculpting the ‘Stalker’: Towards a New Language of Cinema. Tarkovsky, edited by Nathan Dunne, Black Dog, 2008, p. 340. ¹³ It is probably true that modern art’s reflection on itself has been one of its crucial aspects. Sources on this self-reflective capacity of modern art are countless. For a discussion of the progressive theoretical and operative acquisition of the conventional and abstract nature of artistic language see Filiberto Menna's La Linea Analitica dell’Arte Moderna. Le Figure e le Icone, Einaudi, 1975 and Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion Books, 2006.
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itself and the viewers. The multiple layers of “screens” indicate that there are at least two spaces here that I am looking at: one, the cinematic world in which the characters live, and two, the “space-in-between.” That is, a representation before the representation. This additional representational layer creates a metaphoric boundary between the world of the characters and the space of the audience. In composing the shot from which I take my still, Tarkovsky refuses to erase the boundary between fiction and reality through the creation of this additional spatial layer. The “space-in-between” as representation before the representation creates a discrepancy between the fictional and the presumably more real place of the movie theatre. Instead of concealing the screen or passing it off as “reality,” Tarkovsky creates a more sophisticated interaction between the real, the filmic, and their interrelation. We might certainly dismiss this “space-in-between” as part of the filmic, and undoubtedly, this might be the most immediate interpretation of that space. With the architectural frame as a metaphorical “screen,” however, we can imply the materialization of a “space-in-between” whose ontological status is puzzling and demands greater attention. The following assumption might provide an initial starting point to investigate this additional layer: the “space-in-between” is not only a limit, but also the materialization of a relational space. In Of Other Spaces, published posthumously in 1984, Michel Foucault considers that “[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity […] one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites” (22-23). In this text, Foucault concentrates on the heterotopias, a particular kind of “other spaces” simultaneously fictional and real. What Foucault calls heterotopias are “other spaces […] outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (24) Among the principles that characterize these “other spaces,” Foucault also mentions that “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that
are in themselves incompatible” (25). Foucault’s classic example is the “mirror;” a real and tangible object that is also the representation of an illusory space. Heterotopias also function as spaces of materialized illusions through peculiar accumulations of time and space, as in the case of libraries, archives, gardens, theatres, and the cinema itself.¹⁴ Foucault’s notion of heterotopias reminds us that “spaces” themselves have their own history and that “other spaces” might complicate—without fully overcoming—the distinction between an ontological, presumably more real space, and the fictional, representational, epistemological one. Similarly, the “space-in-between” in this still not only acts as a boundary, but also as a relational space in which the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology, the real and the fictional, is complicated without being strictly reduced to the primacy of one term over the other. As Robert Bird discusses, the screen in Tarkovsky’s work acts as a “field of varying depth held together by the crossing of the characters’ and spectators’ gazes” (71). In Tarkovsky’s work, these multiple layers and the relational quality of the image creates “an entire ethics of the screen” (73). Bird concludes that Tarkovsky constantly plays with the problem of mediation between actor and audience, fiction and reality, “not to overcome [their] separation, [but rather] to transform their interrelation” (81). To my mind, finalizing an analysis of the “spacein-between” is best done by building on and expanding Foucault’s and Bird’s inspiring insights, and by considering how in this still the interrelation between actor and audience, fiction and reality, is transformed. To this end, my analysis will concern itself once more with the “space-in-between” flooded by rain as a locus of reflections where a multiplicity of vectors converge, touch each other, and enter into mutual dialogue. A glance at the “sea of rain,” at that boundary which unites and divides, is a glimpse into the possibilities of meaning.
¹⁴ With regards to cinema as heterotopia, Foucault offers a limited interpretation: “the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space” (25).
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THE THIRD LEVEL OF MULTIPLICITY: THE “THIRD-SCREEN” The architectural frame, as previously noted, doubles the actual screen where the images are projected and creates a “space-in-between” the metaphorical screen and the space of the audience. In this liminal space, the rain falls down and illuminates the pavement as the flash of lights projected on the material screen. A “third-screen” situated at the feet of the unnamed figures render them spectators in front of a metaphorical “screen” as well (Fig. 4). Hence, the limit of the material screen is not overcome once, but twice: first, multiplied and implied by the architectural frame, and second, by the “thirdscreen.” Even more crucially, through a relational dialogue between fiction and reality, both the figures inside the film and the viewers that comprise the audience find themselves in a similar position, as if they are both viewers of the same spectacle.¹⁵ The “space-inbetween” creates a dialogical and intersubjective realm which goes beyond the dichotomy of representation/ viewer, object to be seen/subject seeing.¹⁶ Further, the “space-in-between” identifies a limit that separates us from the fictional realm. At the same time, we—the audience—find ourselves in the same position as the unnamed figures: we become the unnamed figures.¹⁷
The correspondence between viewer and fictional characters should not be read as a loss of distinction between fiction and reality, but rather as an invitation to recognize a mutual dialogue between these two dimensions. Viewers are forced outside of the fictional, obliged to remain anchored in their chairs, while they are also immersed in the fictional.¹⁸ Tarkovsky’s ethics of multiple screens produces an existential thesis which argues that the world of experience, in principle, emerges at the intersection between something given, contingent, and resisting on the one hand, and something constructed, decided, and shaped on the other. The “third-screen” is the metaphoric materialization of this intersection, of this “in principle.”¹⁹ Some additional clarifications on this “thirdscreen” should be provided, especially with regards to what I have named its “metaphorical” quality. Indeed, the “third-screen” is not a clearly identifiable symbol, because we do not have sufficient elements to correlate this shape to a general lexicon of symbolic signifiers. The “third-screen” is not in the image as the three characters or the architectural frame. Moreover, it remains uncertain whether such a “third-screen” might have been consciously constructed by Tarkovsky as part of
¹⁵ As pointed out to me by the art historian Julia Walker, this combination of real and fictional has also inspired the imagination of Joyce Carol Oates who directly refers to the Russian movie in her short story, “Stalking” (1972). ¹⁶ Very incisively, Bird has also considered that: “To understand Tarkovsky it is imperative to develop this complex sense of the screen as a locus of interchange between world, image, and spectator” (72). ¹⁷ For a broader discussion of the theoretical and philosophical status of screens, their characterization as active agents and their interrelation with viewers see Mauro Carbone's Filosofia-Schermi. Dal Cinema alla Rivoluzione Digitale, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2016, pp. 89-139. ¹⁸ An argument that might also be developed is the possible parallelism between the “space-in-between” and the concept of “liminality.” Bjorn Thomassen reminds us that “liminality” refers to something very simple: “the experience of finding oneself at a boundary or in an in-between position, either spatially or temporally […] liminality involves the experience of inbetweenness itself […] Human beings tend to ritualize and symbolize such moments and passages” (40). The correspondence between the idea of “space-in-between” and the concept of “liminality” has been pointed out to me by my colleague and friend Lisa Gulesserian. For the concept of “liminality” see, Bjorn Thomassen's, Thinking with Liminality. To the Boundaries of an Anthropological Concept. Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, edited by Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra, Berghahn Books, 2015. ¹⁹ As commented by the philosopher Pietro Montani: “A strict and irreducible dichotomy between reality and ‘simulation’ does not pass any critical investigation. It is completely evident, for instance, that events with notable consequences within the real world take place within the simulated realities accessible in the web: economic transitions, communications, conflict amongst people, etc. […] Similarly, the real world is intimately intertwined with simulations” (16-17, translation mine).
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Fig.4 | Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, detail of the “Third-Screen,” still, Mosfilm, May 1979. 02:21:32.
this still. To a certain degree, one might easily assume that the existence of such a “third-screen” is purely speculative. My interpretative attempt, however, deliberately tries to exceed the immediate visibility of the image and its possible levels of immediate significance. Nevertheless, the non-immediate and reflective attempt of my ref lections are only possible as a consequence of Tarkovsky’s polysemous cinema and its openness to multiple levels of significations.²⁰ The polysemous quality of this still sheds light upon its “poetic logic.” As William Empson clarifies, one of the most original roots of poetic expression lies in its semantic ambiguity:²¹ “[…] the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” (3). Multiple levels of significations are revealed by the poetic word’s capacity for multiple denotation, but also and more prominently by its connotative imprecision. The poetic word—as much as the poetic image—is efficient in multiplying its layers of significance through lack of precision, or in other words, ambiguity. The same “poetic logic” applies to images, such as the case of Tarkovsky’s still. Its ambiguity is its own generative force of meanings.
This additional representational layer creates a metaphoric boundary between the world of the characters and the space of the audience. In such sense, the “third-screen” lies within the still itself and by virtue of the still’s “poetic logic.” Many commentators have stressed that a characterizing aspect in Tarkovsky’s cinema is the adoption of a “deep focus.”²² Numerous visual examples of a deep photographic focus might be found in Tarkovsky’s work, as Tarkovsky demonstrated a preference for images which open themselves to perspectival depths (Fig. 5).²³ As noted by film theorist André Bazin, the “deep focus” shot implies “a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution
²⁰ For an example of a non-polysemous cinematic language, also related to a Russian director—Sergei Eisenstein— see Barthes, p. 56. ²¹ For an analysis of the ambiguity of the poetic language see William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, New Direction, 1969. ²² The reference to the “deep focus” in Tarkovsky’s cinema has been pointed out to me by the media theorist Jeffrey Kirkwood. ²³ The “deep focus” and the lengthy shots have been also correlated to Tarkovsky’s “anti-montage aesthetic.” For a similar discussion see Leon Marvell's, “Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ and the (im)possibility of a Science Fiction Cinema.” Endangering Science Fiction Film, edited by Sean Redmon and Leon Marvell, Routledge, 2016, pp. 132-145.
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Fig.5 | Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, example of “Deep Focus,” still, SovinFilm, Rai 2, Gaumont, May 1983. 02:03:22.
on [the spectator’s] part to the action in progress” (3536). Bazin elucidates that “while analytical montage only calls for [the spectator] to follow his guide […] here [the viewer] is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from [the viewer’s] attention and [viewer’s] will that the meaning of the image in part derives” (35-36). Following Bazin’s insightful observations, one might consider that the technical strategy of the “deep focus” demonstrates how influential the gaze of the viewer is in the “making” of the image. As Italian philosopher Massimo Carboni comments, one of the crucial aspects of modern art lies precisely in the fundamental role played by the viewer for the completion of the work.²⁴ “The spectator,” says Carboni,“might also be standstill in the seat, but the spectator’s eye—that identifies itself with the camera—it is as mobile as ever, and it can research, even unconsciously, what transcends the semantic,
narrative or simply perceptive explicitness that defines the filmic image” (25, translation mine). In our case, however, the still’s peculiar aperture to the mobile action of the spectator’s eyes is not only the result of an uninterrupted perspectival depth or “deep focus.” Rather, the “openness” of the image results from the multiplication of “screens” and layers that the viewer can recombine in a mutual discursive game with the image. What Tarkovsky is indirectly, or perhaps directly, telling us through this still, is that images are more than just passive “things” we interpret, or even strict representations of ideas; they are participants in relationships. Images’ meanings do not simply flourish out in recollection of data and facts or in the sociological analysis of their systems of production, distribution, and consumption. The “meaning” of the image is also subject to the spectator who participates in the construction of meaning.²⁵ Tarkovsky’s still reminds us
²⁴ For a discussion of the role played by the viewer in modern art see Mauro Carboni's, La Mosca di Dreyer. L’opera della Contingenza nelle Arti, Jaca Book, 2007, pp. 23-26. ²⁵ A similar argument is expressed by Hall, 60.
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that an image, in principle, is not a “thing,” but a relationship. The “third-screen” is the site of this dialogue.²⁶ The “openness” of Tarkovsky’s still indicates that its interpretation requires us to recognize a variety of senses, the set of relations, the possibilities of internal combinations, and the identifications of the frayed boundaries of the visual text.²⁷ The process of elaboration implies the opening of spaces of reflections and the construction of structures of mediations which are within the image as much as veiled by the multi-dimensional spatial layers of the still itself. The imaginative work of the visual critic lies in the recognition of these “spaces” and “structures,” and in their verbalization. This work is “imaginative” and “critical” in its capacity to distinguish and differentiate in the continuum of the image what is non-continuum, and hence in need of elaboration.
CONCLUSIONS Roland Barthes reminds us that the still is generally considered “a remote subproduct of the film, a sample, a means of drawing in custom, a pornographic extract, and, technically, a reduction of the work by the immobilization of what is taken to be the sacred essence of cinema—the movement of images” (66). Moving away from this general understanding, my analysis considers the still as more than a temporal suspension and more than a mere “subproduct” of the filmic. In his seminal work “The Third Meaning. Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” Barthes also attempts
Tarkovsky's still reminds us that an image, in principle, is not a "thing," but a relationship and the "Third-Screen" is the site of this dialogue. a preliminary theory of the still. Among its constitutive qualities, Barthes mentions that the still establishes a right to the syntagmatic disjunction of images [...] [that] film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on the top of the other or that one is extracted from the other […] [and finally that] the still throws off the constraint of filmic time.”²⁸ (65-68) Barthes’s theory of the still requires some historical contextualization. Barthes wrote these words in the 1970s, before the explosion of the VHS industry and the popularization of home videos during the 1980s which allowed a great number of viewers to record, pause, and manipulate visual material. The statement that film and still found themselves in an amorous embrace in which neither could be considered without the other makes sense given the historical context during which the actual opportunities of disfiguring the textual and temporal continuum of the filmic were rather limited. After the era of the home video and even more so today, in our digital age of opportunities to totally manipulate both film and still, we are able to dismantle and reorganize the whole and the fragment.
²⁶ For the analysis of the experience of the spectator at the cinema see Casetti, 141-168 and Francesco Casetti. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, Columbia University Press, 2015. ²⁷ For a theoretical and historical discussion of images that differ from Tarkovsky’s cinematic “openness” by depicting normative institutional “frames” integral to the apparatuses of discipline, see John Tagg's, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, University of Minnesota Press, 2009. ²⁸ Foucault’s “fourth principle of heterotopias” which identifies “other spaces” as temporal refusals, resonates in the still’s capacity to displace the filmic time. Some of the examples proposed by Foucault for the heterotopias’ fourth principle, such as “museums” and “libraries,” are not particularly convincing. The space of a traumatic experience, instead, might be more convincingly associated to this fourth characteristic of the heterotopias. Likewise, stills might be considered as the “trauma” of the movie. For a discussion of the “fourth principle of heterotopias” see Foucault, 26.
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Needless to say that the spread of digital technology contributed and continues to strongly contribute to the metamorphosis of the status of the filmic itself. This has been famously noted by film theorist Laura Mulvey, who asserts that [i]n film theory and criticism, delay is the essential process behind textual analysis. The flow of a scene is halted and extracted from the wider flow of narrative development [...] In the course of this process, hitherto unexpected meanings can be found hidden in the sequence […] With the spread of digital technologies this kind of fragmentation of film has become easier to put into practice. (144) The transformation of the filmic experience and the critical analysis of movies under the pressure of new modes of technologies and, conversely, new modes of perception, is a huge discussion that cannot be sufficiently articulated in the context of this essay. Here, I would simply add that with my analysis of this still, isolated from the narrative and temporal continuity offered by the cinematic experience, I do not aim to restore any “auratic” quality of the image. It is not the still in its uniqueness that interests me. What I imply with my analysis is that “to kill” the filmic in its continuity, in this case by isolating one still out of the cinematic flux, recreates the movie as a series of “open” images.²⁹ Today, film and still are not only in a palimpsest relationship, as Barthes previously noted. Films have acquired a natural inclination to segmentation which has been caused by a broader transformation of the media landscape. Such transformation surely determines even retroactive consequences in such a way that Tarkovsky’s
Stalker, originally released in 1979, can reappear to us, today, not only as a filmic occurrence historically grounded, but also as an authorial archive of forms. Again, Laura Mulvey’s words quintessentially capture the nature of this transformation: “[n]ew ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies should bring about a ‘reinvention’ of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia. […] the cinema is deeply affected by the passing of time itself ” (160). We probably are still in a process of discovery and reflection on the intrinsic characteristic of the “reinvention” of textual analysis accompanied and triggered by a transformation of the filmic medium itself. At the same time, we are, perhaps, even no longer strictly talking about cinema anymore, but about something else that we should continue to discuss. This “something else” certainly concerns the “old” medium of the cinema (with its “auratic” continuity of filmic time) and the “new” media of techno-digital manipulation (with its open inclination to transformations).³⁰ As part of this larger and longer discussion, what we can stress, for now, are the following aspects: the filmic text can currently be interrupted in every moment to allow a plurality of developments in multiple directions. In this sense, the characters in Stalker as much as the audience can lose their names, and become the unnamed figures of our thoughts. Similarly, the individual characters or members of the audience cease to exist as separate entities and are reborn as dialogical figures. Deprived of uniqueness, distanced from a narrative continuum, we—characters and audience—become open to the possibilities of the encounter with the other and with ourselves as an other.
²⁹ For the discussion on the impossibility to pause or delay a movie without killing it in its “filmic time” (tempo di film) and the transformation of the filmic operated by new media, such as by television or home videos see the brief but incisive remarks by Enrico Ghezzi. “Alla memoria (dello scrivere di cinema).” Paura e Desiderio: Cose (Mai) Viste, 1974-2001, Bompiani, 1995, pp. 7-13. For an analysis of the “Delayed cinema” and the tension between still frame and the moving image see Mulvey, pp. 8-9, 67-84, 144-160, and 181-196. ³⁰ With regards to the importance of the still in film and its effect on spectatorship, Laura Mulvey also reports the fundamental analysis of Raymond Bellour in The Pensive Spectator, whereby she incisively summarizes: “Bellour makes the crucial point that a moment of stillness within the moving image and its narrative creates a ‘pensive’ spectator who can reflect ‘on the cinema.’ […] This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image” (186).
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WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. “The Third Meaning. Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills.” Image. Music. Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heat, Fontana Press, 1977, pp. 52-68. Bazin, André. “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” What is Cinema? Volume 1, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, with a foreword by Jean Renoir, University of California Press, 2004, pp. 2340. Bird, Robert. Andrei Tarkovsky. Elements of Cinema, Reaktion Books, 2008. Carbone, Mauro. Filosofia-Schermi. Dal Cinema alla Rivoluzione Digitale, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2016. Carboni, Mauro. La Mosca di Dreyer. L’opera della Contingenza nelle Arti, Jaca Book, 2007. Casetti, Francesco. Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, translated by Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo, Columbia University Press, 2008. —. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, Columbia University Press, 2015. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity, New Direction, 1969. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 22-27. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of California Press, 1980. Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, MIT Press, 2006. Garroni, Emilio. Ricognizione della Semiotica, Officina, 1977.
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Ghezzi, Enrico. “Alla memoria (dello scrivere di cinema).” Paura e Desiderio: Cose (Mai) Viste, 1974-2001, Bompiani, 1995, pp. 7-13. Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, The Open University, 1997. Marvell, Leon. “Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ and the (im)possibility of a Science Fiction Cinema.” Endangering Science Fiction Film, edited by Sean Redmon and Leon Marvell, Routledge, 2016, pp. 132-145. Menna, Filiberto. La Linea Analitica dell’Arte Moderna. Le Figure e le Icone, Einaudi, 1975. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology, The University of Chicago Press, 1986. Montani, Pietro. L’Immaginazione Intermediale, Laterza, 2010. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion Books, 2006. Shiff, Richard. Doubt, Routledge, 2007. Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Thomassen, Bjorn. “Thinking with Liminality. To the Boundaries of an Anthropological Concept.” Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, edited by Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra, Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 39-58. Tsymbal, Evgeny. “Sculpting the ‘Stalker’: Towards a New Language of Cinema.” Tarkovsky, edited by Nathan Dunne, Black Dog, 2008, pp. 339-351.
The Three Winds of Albert Lamorisse BY MARK GOODALL | University of Bradford
ABSTRACT This text discusses the films of French director Albert Lamorisse in relation to the poetics of cinema. It focuses on three of Lamorisse’s films, Crin Blanc (1953), Le Ballon Rouge (1956) and Le Vent des Amoureux (1978), in order to examine his fascination with wind, a force of nature, due to its invisibility, that is virtually impossible to capture on film. Certain French theorists, however, have tried to explain the power of the wind, most notably Gaston Bachelard, whose works are quoted here as part of the analysis, while a few distinguished filmmakers, such as Joris Ivens and Andrei Tarkovsky, have used wind in interesting ways. But only Lamorisse had what could be described as a sustained obsession. Despite early success (the great French film theorist André Bazin was praiseworthy about his short films), Lamorisse has been somewhat neglected in recent years. Thus, this essay highlights the unique skills of a ‘forgotten man’ of French post-war cinema.
“The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams.” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 15).
T
he spectacular amir kabir, or Karaj Dam, inaugurated in 1961, can be found approximately forty miles northwest of Tehran. It provides tap water for Tehran’s 7.8 million people, in addition to the irrigation demands of over 50,000 hectares of nearby farmland. On June 2, 1970, a helicopter mounted with a motion picture camera was circling the dam, making repeated lows runs across the surface of the water in order to get dramatic shots from the air. On the final run, however, the vehicle became entangled in the high-tension wires that support the structure, spiralled out of control, and plummeted into the Karaj River below.
Tragically, everyone on board the helicopter was killed. One of the passengers was the renowned French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse. Lamorisse and his team had been shooting sequences of the spectacular dam for inclusion in a film he was making for the authorities under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Increasingly fascinated by the mysticism of Eastern philosophy, Lamorisse had settled in Iran following the success of his feature films and his earlier short films,
several of which are some of the most highly regarded in the history of cinema. The film that Lamorisse was completing, Le Vent des Amoureux (The Lovers’ Wind), was a documentary study of air currents in Iran and was concerned with the mystic-poetic values of this immense natural force. By the general standards of the non-fiction film, the interaction between sound and the carefully constructed poetic images in Le Vent des Amoureux is astonishing. Aside from the tragic and dramatic end to the film’s production, Lamorisse, with this venture, had invented a new kind of aerial photography (which he branded ‘Helivision’) offering some of the most sublime images of the landscape of the globe ever made. In attempting to capture with the film camera something as ethereal and elusive as wind, Lamorisse was creating a new form of cinema. Yet Le Vent des Amoureux was not Lamorisse’s first encounter with the power of wind. As an analysis of his previous work makes clear, the ‘lovers’ wind’ of Persia was a continuation of a process of discovery, the third of Lamorisse’s adventures in movement, time, and space.
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THREE WINDS? Your film will have the beauty, or the sadness, or what have you, that one finds in a town, in a countryside, in a house and not the beauty, sadness etc. that one finds in the photograph (my emphasis) of a town, a countryside, or a house. (Bresson 70) Albert Lamorisse’s films certainly strain to achieve an idealisation of the cinematic image on screen. In retrospect, the mystical dimension to Lamorisse’s method of filmmaking as seen in Le Vent des Amoureux can be located in his early films. But analysing Lamorisse’s search for expressing wind through cinema is problematic, not least because there are many possible ways to read this particular kind of work: semiotic, psychoanalytical, mystical. André Bazin discussed Lamorisse’s early films in relation to a discussion about montage and realism and the paradoxical nature of how these two seemingly contrary modes co-exist in film (and specifically how Le Ballon Rouge does not rely on montage for its charm and beauty). Ultimately, it is Bazin’s poetics of cinema that is useful here. His description of Lamorisse’s work as ‘documentary on the imagination’ is, we shall see, extremely pertinent (46). Pasolini too theorized a ‘cinema of poetry’. His notion of ‘expressivity,’ likening cinema with dreams and memories, which annoyed many film theorists at the time, confirmed the unique qualities of film art and this also attracted Bazin (Pasolini 544).¹ Pasolini was interested in the poetic language of cinema, a form of film art that had been neglected in the drive for cinema as ‘language of narrative prose’ (547). When wind appears in film it often has the suggestion of a dream. In the films of Lamorisse, ‘the tendency of the cinematic language’ is expressly subjective and lyrical (548). Le Vent des Amoureux is made precisely in the manner of Pasolini’s ‘free indirect discourse’ where a film's connection with
the viewer is akin to that of written (or more accurately ‘spoken’) poetry (549). I will show how the almost pre-human order of the oneiric, the ‘aspiration towards new images’ (Bachelard, Air and Dreams 2) is what Lamorisse, to the end, sought out. Another methodology I have found useful is a ‘cinephilic’ reading of Lamorisse’s films. Why? Because the cinephilic ‘reading’ of film is paradoxically first and foremost ‘a way of watching films’ (De Baecque and Fremaux qtd. in Keathely 6). Further, as Christian Keathley points out, the fetishisation of details in a film is as ancient as cinema itself (Keathley 8). Lamorisse’s films, in my view, invite the perpetual scanning of the screen in a perceptive experience that is ‘panoramic’ (8). The urban legend that has developed (one of many) around the pioneering films of Auguste and Louis Lumière is that audiences were less entranced with the actions of feeding of the child in Le Repas de Bébé (1895) than with the rustling of the wind in the trees, visible in the background of the family group. Lamorisse, consciously or not, also sought out this ‘wind in the trees’. In addition to poetic and cinephilic interactions with the cinema of Lamorisse, I have found it also useful to employ thinkers and writers whose works are concerned with the natural elements in art. Thus, the texts of the early surrealist/impressionist writers and the explorations by Gaston Bachelard into the ‘poetics of space’ and how the ‘imaginary is immanent in the real’ (Bachelard 1988, Air and Dreams viii) are relevant and illuminating. The key motif in this study is of course that of the wind. The properties of wind have been explored since the early days of cinema, as noted above. The advent of sound film and wide-screen formats allowed for a more nuanced expression of the powers of wind. As an ethereal presence, it is not the most obvious or dramatic element to explore through the cinematic arts. Lyall Watson argues that ‘of
¹ What Pasolini said was that ‘there is a whole complex world of significant images- formed as much of gestures and of all sorts of signs coming from the environment, as of memories or dreams- which is proposed as the ‘instrumental’ foundation of cinematic communication.’
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In attempting to capture with the film camera something as ethereal as wind, Lamorisse was creating a new form of cinema. all the natural forces, wind is the most enigmatic’ Watson (300). The invisibility of wind is what makes it intriguing cinematically, because even though film is a strongly visual art form, how can it capture something invisible? One way is by using sound and it is this that Lamorisse excels in, especially with Le Vent des Amoureux. As Chesterton wrote: ‘You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind’ (26-27). Yet, when wind does appear in film, it can have a devastating effect. One of the more memorable uses of wind occurs in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror (1975), a mystical and elliptical autobiographical study of the filmmakers’ childhood. One of the most famous scenes occurs when the father walks away from the mother through a field of grass. As he makes his way into the distance, a sudden rush of wind blows passed him towards the woman (and the spectator) flattening the tall grasses and surrounding foliage. The wind makes a loud, surging noise on the soundtrack. Tarkovsky uses the natural wind as a motif for the spirit, a visual haiku, akin to those of the poet Basho whom he revered: “The image in cinema is based on the ability to present as an observation one’s own perception of an object.” (Tarkovsky 107).² Perhaps the most noticeable filmmaker devoted to wind is the Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens. Several examples of his work mirror that of Lamorisse, including his film Pour Le Mistral (For the Mistral, 1965) and his later film A Tale of the Wind (1988). Pour Le Mistral, a cinematic travelogue along the course of the winds of
Haute Provence, extends the slightly ominous tone of Lamorisse’s first film Crin Blanc. Wind, in Crin Blanc, is not the principle feature (instead it is the relationship between a young boy and a white stallion). Yet the same investigation of the effect of landscape of human psyche is strongly in evidence. Interestingly, Ivens’s film follows a similar trajectory as that of Le Vent des Amoureux in the sense that Pour le Mistral begins with the ominous clouds circling the mountains and ends at the sea. In Pour le Mistral, the narration (provided by Andre Verdet) is poetic and the music used by Luc Ferrari forbidding and severe. The narrator intones that “we must post a watch” on the mistral as the intense power of the wind can lead to chaos and destruction (this sentiment is also echoed in Le Vent des Amoureux). We are told that: “the Mistral likes to be resisted” (Ivens 2008) and the subsequent section of dramatic freeze-frames of the wind causing mischief (hats, letters, scarves are thrown around; a wedding ceremony is disrupted and the skirts of young women are lifted up) demonstrates this.³ The ‘wind in the trees’ is also evident in Ivens’s film as the grasses by the sea are blown and flattened. A herd of white horses is also seen; this again echoes Crin Blanc. With techniques such as the freeze-frame and the sudden burst half-way through into colour cinemascope, Ivens, like Lamorisse, eschews the ‘rules’ of documentary cinema. Particular moments in Pour Le Mistral arguably prefigure Lamorisse’s technique: the way in which Ivens’s camera swoops over the land of the camargue and the final shot of Pour Le Mistral, where a helicopter glides out to the Mediterranean sea is mirrored in Le Vent des Amoureux.
LE MISTRAL: LAMORISSE’S FIRST WIND Crin Blanc (Usually translated into English as ‘White Mane,’1952) was Albert Lamorisse’s first foray into the ‘cinema of winds’. The film tells the story of a young
² A less monumental but still noticeable example occurs in the British film Enduring Love (2004) where in the opening scene of the film a hot air balloon sweeps up into the air carried by a sudden burst of powerful wind. ³ These sentiments are also closely echoed in the song Le Vent by French singer Georges Brassens, the lines ‘Qu´il préfèr´ choisir les victimes de ses petits jeux’ and ‘Prudent, prends garde à ton chapeau,’ having a particular resonance.
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Fig.1 | Still from Crin Blanc (author collection)
fisherman, Folco, who discovers a wild Camargue horse which he tries to befriend. The gardians (men who look after herds of horse and bulls in the Camargue region) of the herd, however, seek to capture and tame Crin Blanc. Folco tries to help Crin Blanc evade capture and after a long chase sequence the film ends with Folco and the horse swimming together out to sea. No less an authority than André Bazin argued that Lamorisse’s early films, including Crin Blanc, were the ‘only two real children’s films ever made’ (Bazin 41). Bazin typically praised the ‘realism’ of Crin Blanc (and also the subsequent film Red Balloon) but noted that the film introduced a ‘dialectic belonging to the realm of the imaginary’ (Bazin 37). In another more radical reading, lettrist Ivan Chtcheglov described Folco’s struggle as a ‘symbol of the purity of the LEGITIMATE desire for LIFE’ (sic) (Chtcheglov 27).⁴ The horse in the film is clearly a real horse but also operates, via Lamorisse’s cinematic lens, at the level of a dream object. The superficial gritty ‘western’ reality of the narrative is undercut in the final moments, when Folco and Crin Blanc swim out to sea together to a place that, the narrator informs us, could well be transcendent. The film’s persistent evocation of the concept of freedom is romantic and hallucinogenic. It is notable that Chtcheglov invoked Crin Blanc in reconsidering his theorizing of the derive.⁵ In the opening section of the film, the wind can be seen sweeping across the plain, tossing around the horses’ distinctive long hair. Crin Blanc is not so much a film of the ‘wind in the trees’ as the wind in the hair of the horse (a ‘wild horse’ as the film’s subtitle notes- see Fig.1). The many thrilling chase scenes in the film are energized by the animals running wild through the sands and the gaze, salicornia and radeau typical of the region. So it is not then
just the mistral itself, but also the wind generated by the kinetic energy of the film form (horses racing across the land). It also blows softly around Folco’s house, shaking the trees and the boy’s hair, blowing his tiny boat across the waters. Later, horrifically, it blows across the marsh grasses, helping to fan the flames that the gardians have lit to force Crin Blanc out. At the end of the film, when Folco and Crin Blanc gallop away from the gardians into the sea, the camera can barely keep up with the pace. It is as if the wind is driving Folco along. When he enters the sea, a curious thing happens on the soundtrack: the crashing of the sea waves is augmented by the sound of a swirling wind (the mistral?). The wild landscape, the ‘savage region’ of Lamorisse’s Camargue was also revisited in film by the Renault motor company in their 1961 film Ballade en Camargue. This is an intriguing travelogue directed by Phillipe Condroyer with a dramatic score by Antoine Duhamel and drawing on the landscapes Lamorisse had offered up. The film was naturally intended to demonstrate the robust nature of their latest ‘Model 4’ as it traverses such rough terrain. Ballade en Camargue shows two Renault cars racing each other like wild horses, the cinematographers clearly visible in each car, filming each other. Duhamel’s score mimics the Wild West themes of American cowboy films but throws in some gypsy inflections by way of a Classical guitar. A playful interaction between the ‘ancient’ and the ‘modern’ occurs when the two cars encircle a group of gardians, the torturers of Folco in Crin Blanc. The cars crash through pools of water and head for the marshes of the coast. Meanwhile the ancient rituals of the region are evoked as the gardians chase and capture the black bulls, the other mythical creature of the Camargue. Eventually the herds of white horses ridden by gardians merge with the cars in a chaotic melange of images and sounds. Of course, by attaching a narrative line closely following
⁴ In this text, Chtcheglov goes on to draw a religious parable from the film. Folco and Crin Blanc’s plunge into the sea ‘is the ‘ fuite en avant’ of the LOST CHILD, but careful, as in dreams words are often reversible and one can say the SAVED CHILD (fleeing, saving himself, saving his soul) because at the end of day it is better to DIE ALIVE than LIVE DEAD. The child, if he accepts LOSING his horse, enters into the life of the hommes-semblants and it will be the END for him’. ⁵ Also of significance is the fact that the screenwriter of Crin Blanc Denys Colomb de Daunant later made his own film of the Camargue horses Le Songe des Chevaux Sauvages (1960) a fantasy hymn to the wild horse that is beautifully poetic and disturbing.
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a single character and a single white horse, by singling them out for specific cinematic representation, Crin Blanc humanises the ancient myths of Southern France. In Ballade en Camargue, a gardian eventually captures a white horse as it gallops along the shore. The film both invokes and romanticises Lamorisse’s film and shows the modern car as a cinematic prop par excellence. But the comic sequence of a donkey travelling in the back of the red car merely reminds us that this is the work of advertising as opposed to cinematic art. Crin Blanc is made of more poetic stuff. While representations of the Midi in culture are problematic,⁶ Lamorisse side-steps political questions and exoticism in favour of questions of the spirit. While ‘stereotypes’ of the Camargue region are evident in Crin Blanc (the brutish gardians; Folco’s quaint fisher-folk family), they are figures merely placed to enhance the ‘struggle’ both Folco and the horse have for their freedom- the Midi of ‘human dimensions’. The gardians try to break/tame the ‘wild character and love of liberty’ (Droit 15) of Crin Blanc and of course fail. In this way, Folco represents the free spirit of the Camargue (‘Yes, he dreams, you see) (60). The dream-like atmosphere of some of the key scenes (for example the setting-fire of the marsh grasses by the herdsmen) and the explicit detour into one of Folco’s own dreams (where he imagines Crin Blanc and himself at one by the sea), where boy and horse become a ‘concentrated being’ (Bachelard The Poetics of Space, 45-46), expands the film into the territory of poetic fantasy. The mythic quality of the story is enhanced by these moments of unusual poetry making the film one of the ‘paths to the world of infinite dreams’ (41). Denys Colomb de Daunat’s Poete des Chevaux, fusing the work of horses and cattle with a philosophy of landscape and history, epitomised the mythopoetry of the Camargue.⁷ The film is a continuation of that.
Of course this region of southern France, the setting for the film, is renowned for its fierce wind. This wind blows through the hair of Folco and Crin Blanc and drives the boy and horse to outrun their pursuers towards their final (uncertain) destiny. Through a haunting exhibition of cinematic emotion and poetry, Lamorisse leaves the viewer deeply and profoundly stirred. The dynamism of the horse and boy in eventual harmony, an incredible cinematic vision: “The sight of movement gives happiness: horse (my emphasis), athlete, bird” (Bresson 73). And what Lamorisse offers in this film is a visual representation of what Jouve calls the ‘iron hooves of dream’, the image of a ‘dream horse swimming eternally at the side of little Folco’ (Bachelard The Poetics of Space, 48)⁸. To be a ‘truth of the imagination, it (the film image) must die and be born again of reality itself’. And cinema is like a dream where ‘words are often reversible and one can (interpret Folco as) the saved child (fleeing, saving himself, saving his soul) because at the end of day it is better to DIE ALIVE than LIVE DEAD’ (Chtcheglov 27). This is what Folco and Crin Blanc, with the help of the Mistral, in this ‘kingdom of space’ (Droit 21), achieved: ‘the kingdom of love and realisation of desire’ (Chtcheglov 27).
LE VENT DE PARIS: THE SECOND WIND A more explicit wind propels Lamorisse’s second highly-acclaimed, multi award-winning⁹ film, Le Ballon Rouge (1956). The film tells the story of a young boy, Pascal,¹⁰ whose cheerless life is jolted by the discovery of a discarded large red balloon. Pascal quickly realises, after the balloon follows him to school, that the object has a mind of its own. A series of adventures (including a
⁶ See for example: François de la Bretèque, Images of ‘Provence’ in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, Popular European Cinema (Routledge, 1992), pp. 58-71. ⁷ Colomb de Daunant appears in the film as one of the gardians, as does his brother Alain. ⁸ Bachelard is quoting Pierre-Jean Jouve. ⁹ Including the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 (Best Short Film) and an Oscar in 1957 for Best Screenplay – Original. ¹⁰ Played by Lamorisse’s son of the same name.
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The film both invokes and romanticizes Lamorisse's film and shows the modern car as a cinematic prop par excellence. confrontation at his school and the disruption of Sunday mass) culminate when a gang of boys, jealous of the balloon, attempt to burst it. This they finally achieve, only for Pascal to be hoisted high into the sky by thousands of other Parisian balloons that have gathered together out of sympathy with his plight. So in this film, another ‘object’ comes to life through the magic of cinematic representation. But what is it that propels the red balloon of this film? A wind certainly, but a specific kind of mischievous and magic wind, not unlike that of the mistral. In place of hats etc. being blown around, as in Pour Le Mistral, we witness instead the free spirit of the balloon which cannot be contained by the ugly and ruinous people around it (until the penultimate act that is). This wind is a force exclusively for the balloon- it does not affect the rest of Parisian life. The first time we see the balloon move is when Pascal, denied access to the bus, has to run to school and the balloon trails behind him as he runs. It is the kinetic energy of Pascal who makes it move (Fig.2). Henceforth, the balloon develops its own energy and movement. When it is cast out of the apartment by Pascal’s guardian, it hovers instead of being blown into the sky. The next day it follows Pascal to school- even tracking the bus when it is again refused entry (this sequence is superbly filmed by Lamorisse- the balloon rushes along the Parisian streets). But though it is mischievous (it helps the balloon dodge the clutches of the children and adults alike), the Paris wind helps Pascal. When Pascal passes a girl in the street who is carrying a blue balloon, the balloon mischievously darts back to follow the girl (is this moment a short precursor to The
Lover’s Wind?). The wily wind blows the balloon back to Pascal (Pascal urges it to ‘fly away’, which is does not). When it is finally burst by one of the boys the ‘wind’ escaping from the balloon is the death wind, it is painful and lingered over, like the death of a main character in a drama. At the end, the wind herds the millions of Parisian balloons to raise Pascal (like Folco) to a form of transcendence. The balloon is invested, partly through the powers of cinematic reanimation, with what the surrealists define as reframing: ordinary and banal objects placed in an unusual or context become ‘inflated’ with new meaning and new powers (Keathley 68). The surrealist writer, Louis Aragon, spelled out the role children play in the creation of this unique representation: Poets without being artists, children sometimes fix their attention on an object to the point where their concentration makes it grow larger, grow so much it completely occupies their visual field, assumes a mysterious aspect, and loses all relation to its purpose...Likewise, on the screen, objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloak room tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings (51-52). It is precisely this form of poetic value that Lamorisse invests his films with. Pascal’s balloon is a vibrant red (as the title suggests) but it is not the red used in famous cinematic juxtapositions (Eisenstein’s Potemkin, Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List¹¹) wherein the colour red becomes a totem, but a warm more poetic red symbolizing the little boy’s dreams and desires against a grey postwar Paris. In a subsequent film Voyage en Ballon (1962, English title: Stowaway in the Sky) Lamorisse extends the simple image of the red balloon to a full-scale romantic adventure narrative again featuring Pascal, here fascinated by
¹¹ See Paul Coates, Cinema and Colour (Pallgrave/BFI, 2010) for an examination of this.
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Fig.2 | Still from The Red Balloon (author collection)
his grandfather’s hot-air balloon. As the old man takes the balloon on a demonstration, Pascal climbs on board and lifts them both upward to an adventure. The balloon travels all around France across the ocean and over Mont Blanc in the Alps. An anxiety is developed as the balloon (as in Le Ballon Rouge) turns out to have a mind of its own. We see how objects on the landscape (church spires, factory chimneys) become objects of threat. Ivens’s Pour Le Mistral is evoked when a wedding party in Brittany is disrupted by the forces of the air. This film taps into the French obsession with hot-air balloon travel of which they were pioneers.¹² Another of Lamorisee’s ‘French’ shorts can be seen as a ‘practice run’ for Le Vent des Amoureux: Paris Jamais Vu (1967), a twenty minute hymn to ‘unseen Paris’ which incorporates soaring aerial shots of the Parisian skyline accompanied by commentary written by Roger Glachart and narrated by Jean Piat.¹³ As with Crin Blanc, there is a nod to what Lamorisse would do with Le Vent des Amoureux. The final moments of the film are shot via a helicopter, the camera hovering near and adjacent to the balloons as they rise into the blue Parisian sky. Here, Lamorisse’s ‘Helevision’ technique was being invented; the stunning sweep round famous monuments, skimming to the apex of sites such as the Paris Opéra and the Arc de Triomphe, circling the crown of the Tour Eiffel before a dramatic plunge down the shaft of the column and a glide through its legs. The camera also creeps right up close to Auguste Dumont’s Génie de la Liberté at the top of the Colonne de Juillet at Place de la Bastille, an appropriate metaphor for the freedom
the camera is permitted with this ‘Helivision’ technique. Despite the lukewarm reception for the film, at least in the UK,¹⁴ Le Ballon Rouge results an entirely sympathetic representation of the uneven fantasies and dream world of childhood, the ‘original impulse’ of youth (Bachelard The Poetics of Space, 33).
THE THIRD WIND: THE LOVER’S WIND Lamorisse’s foray into cinematic wind reached its apotheosis in Le Vent des Amoureux.¹⁵ Not only was this his last experiment with cinematic wind it was, as noted, his final film. Like Ivens’s film Pour le Mistral, Le Vent des Amoureux tracks the progress of a specific wind, in this instance one of the many powerful natural forces held in high regards by the Iranian people. The curious conceit of the film is that the entire narration is ‘spoken’ by Baadah Sabah- the Lover’s wind.¹⁶ Throughout this adventure the winds ‘talk’ to each other. There is the ‘Warm Wind’, the ‘Crimson Wind,’ the ‘Evil Wind,’ and the ‘Lover’s Wind.’ The visual quality of the film is due almost exclusively to the distinctive aerial photography Lamorisse had developed in Paris Jamais Vu. Dubbed ‘Helivision,’ the technique included fitting the film camera to the front of the helicopter so as to allow for very smooth tracking of locations (buildings, animals, clouds) and close-up shots of objects otherwise inaccessible to audiences.¹⁷ In Le Vent des Amoureux, we track the wind from the Persian Gulf in the south of Iran north to the Caspian Sea by way of Tehran and Persepolis. The swirling sounds of the wind open the film. We see a tornado
¹² In 1738, a golden year for French ballooning, the Montgolfier brothers reached a height of 1.5 miles in a pioneering flight at Annonay and Versailles, Jean Pilâtre de Rozier, and the Marquis d’Arlandes made the first free balloon ascent form the Bois de Boulogne and J.A.C. Charles ascended from the Champ de Mars in a balloon inflated with hydrogen gas (Theodora Fitzgibbon, A Taste of Paris, Dent, 1974, p.119.) ¹³ Hou Hsiao Hsien’s 2007 film Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge is an expanded fantasy on Lamorisse’s film. ¹⁴ See for example the anonymous reviewer in Monthly Film Bulletin (No.275, Vol.23, December, 1956) who charged Lamorisse with having ‘lost the vivacity and spontaneity which are essential qualities of the world of childhood’ (p. 158). ¹⁵ The film is also known in English as “The Lover’s Wind” or by its Farsi title Baadah Sabah. ¹⁶ The narration was written by Roger Glachant. ¹⁷ Lamorisse’s concept has become a generic word for spectacular aerial cinematography- especially of nature. A present-day company called “Helivision,” based in North Carolina, market their product as ‘gyro-stabilized aerial camera systems to film visually stunning high definition aerial footage’ (see: http://www.helivision.com/)
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of wind lifting and then dispersing the sands of the desert. The lover’s wind introduces itself: ‘I was born on the edge of the desert.’ Subsequent remarks outline the existential angst suffered by these winds, which are both feared and hated in equal measure. ‘I was an ocean wind…I wanted to escape. Was I a fool?’ the wind asks at one point. The camera then flies over numerous key landmarks of the ‘old’ Iran: the Tower of Babel, temples and bridges and the desolated and abandoned villages, dead cities, that these winds have ‘reduced to silence.’ ‘We have buried everything’ they confess. We are shown the crushed and broken city of Persepolis, commonly held to have been sacked and burned by Alexander the Great. However, the wind informs us here: ‘it was the forces of the air who destroyed the city. Not fire but the wind!’ The music for this sequence is haunting and sad; elsewhere we have heard the lyrical folk strains of composer Hosein Dehlavi. A moving sequence then ensues, devoted to the nomads drifting between these derelict cities. I would suggest that Lamorisse aligns himself with these people; a people unable to settle in any one place at a time but longing for the eternal drift. The hideous spectacle of the ‘tower of the dead’ reveals how corpses are dragged up to the apex of the building and left to be blackened by the intense heat of the sun. Then the fishermen pushing their boats along the shallow lines ‘pushing their own towers of silence’ the narration informs us. Suddenly the breeze blows one of the boats over while the wind informs us we are seeing the ‘wind of sudden death’. The dazzling abstractions of the landscape and of the sea is enhanced by the relentless journey of the air-born camera. At one point, we follow an oil pipeline from the waters of the port, across the desert, the pipes that ‘bring fire.’ But Le Vent des Amoureux is not simply a rural
excursion. We also get to experience the ‘winds of the city’- modern Tehran where the abstractions of manmade structures dazzle and astound. In one virtuoso moment, the camera swoops down through a window frame and inside the Golestan Palce in order that we can (clandestinely) witness the shimmering treasures within. But the wind tires of the city and departs again across the rice fields which reflect the patterns of the sky. The wind, virtually omnipresent, seeks to find it’s own ‘private paradise’- the Caspian Sea. This constant journeying takes its toll; it creates a ‘wearing away of memory’ (which fortunately Lamorisse’s film camera preserves). This took me back to Michel Driot’s response to the Camargue: in this liminal space ‘at once miracle and mirage’ one can ‘lose all notion of space and time...’ (Droit 64). The film thus achieves the highest level of Bachelard’s ‘poetic imagination,’ where ‘the function of the real and the function of the unreal are made to cooperate’ (Bachelard The Poetics of Space, xxxi). The Helivision technique perfectly encapsulates the violence of the wind. At times it is not clear whether it is the wind we are following or the blast caused by the helicopter’s blades that are blasting people and things on the ground. A surreal moment is when the camera alights on hundreds of carpets being washed and laid out to dry in the sun across the slopes of a rock mountainside. Is it the wind of the blades that are hurling them about, casting the objects into the sky?¹⁸ The freedom sought in every Lamorisse film from the confines of modern capitalism are evoked at the end of the film where two lovers ride away on horseback pursued by a gang of ‘bandits’ (this is actually part of a traditional Iranian rural wedding festival). Just as the horsemen are closing in the wind blows for one final
¹⁸ I have written elsewhere on the potentially violent and abusive effect of the helicopter camera shot. In Jacopetti and Prosperi’s controversial drama-documentary Addio Zio Tom (1972), a recreation of the conditions of slavery in the Southern United Stases, the film opens with a strong wind blasting cotton pickers working in the fields). In 1973, another renowned French director, Claude Lelouch, made a documentary called Iran which opens with familiar ‘Helivision’ shots. The film proceeds in the manner of 1970s European documentary with a series of contrasting juxtapositions of old and new, elliptical framing, a series of starling edits (a shot of a man lighting an oil lamp is cut with that of an oil explosion) and unusual manipulations of sound (at one point the sound of a young girl’s laughing echoes around a montage of Islamic temples). The music was provided by major film composer Francis Lai and incorporates the lush orchestrations for which is famous. Aside from the opening sequence (and some of the locations and preoccupations and the final coda which it resembles stylistically somewhat), it has little in common with Lamorisse’s film which offers a highly subjective and spiritual/mystical interpretation of the country.
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Mark Goodall
time, sending the hunters back from where they came and the lovers to speed off in freedom. The bizarre coda which Lamorisse was forced to add to the film (the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Art, who funded the film, were displeased that the film did not show enough of the modern Iran), which includes footage shot on Lamorisse’s final, fatal, helicopter adventure, merely reinforces the repressive nature of the urban environment. Factories, laboratories, universities, cars, textile production and the development of Iran’s Nuclear reactor (a project creating a certain level of anxiety in the present time) are all documented in a static and dystopian manner and a ‘uniformity’ of message (Naficy).¹⁹ In place of the lyricism of Le Vent des Amoureux (and of the other films), here there are sharp and hurried edits. This time we hear the synthetic wind of so-called ‘progress’; in place of traditional folk music we hear haunting sounds of the contemporary synthesizer. This six-minute sequence is filled with the nervous dread of science-fiction films such as The Andromeda Strain and Phase IV. There is even, at one point, a curious shot of a small red balloon (part of the chemical process), a pathetic and a sad reminder of the glorious tradition of Lamorisse’s previous cinematic works. The final images of this coda, repeated helivision shots of the Karaj Dam edited by Jeanne Claude Lamorisse after her husband’s death, add an incredibly sad and poignant sensibility to the film- the final expulsions of Lamorisse’s romantic and creative force, blunted and neutered by the forces of a ‘false image of progressiveness’ (224). This cinematic location we are watching is now a site of death.
CONCLUSION: A BOUT DE SOUFFLÉ “All great, simple images reveal a psychic state” (Bachelard The Poetics of Space, 72). In these three films, wind for Lamorisse represents a form of mystical
transcendence from the everyday into another spirit world. Lyall Watson claims that ‘there are no photographs of the wind,’ yet Lamorisse’s films contradict this (254). The wind, from Crin Blanc to his last film, is to remain ‘a great sanctuary’ (Droit 66). That is not to say that the ordinary ‘earth’ is superseded. The spirit of the wind must interact with the human realm; it is this co-existence which Lamorisse searched to find and to show in his short but significant film output. For Lamorisse, the story of his films emerged out of the creation of the ‘dreaming consciousness’ and the magnificent cinematic image (xvi). In this he echoes Raul Ruiz who argued that ‘it is the type of image produced that determines the narrative, not the reverse’ (8). Lamorisse, especially with Le Vent des Amoureux can be seen as a ‘shamanic film-maker’ who takes us on a ‘voyage to different worlds’ (Ruiz 105). All his films explore ‘liberating aerial motion’ (Bachelard, Air and Dreams 8). The poetic nature of spaces of the natural landscape can also be found, as all his films demonstrate, via architecture. Lamorisse shows that “Cinema and architecture function as alluring projection screens for our emotions” (McCann 382). Lamorisse was a ‘tender and wistful film-maker, more lyrical than sentimental’ (Martin 79). Perhaps this is why he is now almost invisible. The sad coda to Baadeh Sabah seems to epitomise his life and work: ‘I have turned mellow. Now I am pure scent and music, I have become Baadeh sabah- the lover’s wind. Whenever you see trees stirring gently in a special way know that it is Baadeh Sabah passing by, urging f lowers, bodies souls and flesh to come to life.’ Finally, if one were to compare Lamorisse to a writer, it would be the Provencal novelist Henri Bosco, once described as “the greatest dreamer of modern times.” Bosco’s mystical stories, mostly concerned with the ancient, primordial forces of the earth, find a cinematic expression in Lamorisse’s films. Bazin’s
¹⁹ According to Naficy, this troubling form of representation was shaped by the Pahlavi regime with the collaboration of Western filmmakers. In some senses Lamorisse did not play along with this, and paid the price.
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observation that Lamorisse’s work was a ‘documentary on the dream’ is borne out by these three unforgettable films (46).
Lamorisse's foray into cinematic wind reached its apotheosis in Le Vent Amoureax.
WORKS CITED Aragon, Louis. “On Décor.” The Shadow and its Shadow: surrealist writings on the cinema, edited by Paul Hammond, City Lights, 2001, pp. 50-54. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1969. ---. Air and Dreams: an essay on the imagination of movement. The Dallas Institute, 1988. Bazin, Andre. “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.” What is Cinema? California UP, 2005, pp.41-52. Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematographer. København, Green Integer, 1997. Chesterton, G.K. “The Wind and the Trees.” Tremendous Trifles. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1909, pp.59-63. Chtcheglov, Ivan. “Fragments of commentary on the formulary.” Ecrits Retrouvés. Editions Allia, 2006, pp.7-29. Droit, Michel. Camargue. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1963.
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Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees. Indiana UP, 2006. McCann, Ben. “A Discreet Character? Action spaces and architectural specificity in French poetic realist cinema.” Screen, vol. 45, no. 4, 2004, pp. 375-382. Martin, Marcel. France. Zwemmer/Barnes, 1971. Naficy, Hamid. “Non-fiction Fiction: documentaries on Iran.” Iranian Studies, vol. 12, no. 3/4, 1979, pp. 217-238. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “The Cinema of Poetry.” Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, California UP, 1976, pp. 542-558. Pour Le Mistral. Directed by Joris Ivens. Europese Stiching Joris Ivens/Capi Films, 2008. Ruiz, Raul. Poetics of Cinema. Paris: Dis Voir, 2005. Tarkosky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time. The Bodley Head, 1986. Watson, Lyall. Heaven’s Breath: a natural history of the wind. Hodder & Stoughton, 1984.
FEATURETTE
Adam Lee Miller
Colour and Chaos:
Unpacking the Mise-en-scène of Tokyo Drifter’s Reshot Finale BY ADAM LEE MILLER | Aichi Shukutoku University
ABSTRACT Seijun Suzuki is an oft-overlooked Japanese filmmaker who evolved from a studious, hardworking genre filmmaker, to a director who wilfully contorted tropes and rules he had spent years learning. In his heyday, he worked for Nikkatsu Studios, and made 40 films for them in the space of just 15 years. In 1967, he was unceremoniously fired from Nikkatsu after releasing Branded to Kill, now a cult classic that garners critical acclaim, which was deemed nonsensical and unprofitable by the head of Nikkatsu, Kyusaku Hori. Tokyo Drifter was the third to last film Suzuki made with Nikkatsu, and its psychedelic colour palette, lack of continuity, and counter-intuitive framing and editing confused and annoyed Suzuki’s bosses. It caused so much tension that Suzuki was ordered to recreate the final scene, which is far more action-packed than his original vision, but no less strange. This paper tries to break down this rushed reshoot, and argues that some of Suzuki’s original ideas remain, albeit in a very coded manner.
S
eijun suzuki was a Japanese filmmaker who found himself in a very similar position in the 1960s to the American film noir directors that came decades before him: he was under contract at a major studio (in his case Nikkatsu Studios) and expected to provide a high volume of B-List films to pad out the production. With a very limited budget, and strict time constraint, he made an astonishing 40 films between 1956 and 1967. Whilst at a forum honouring his work in Los Angeles in 1997, Suzuki spoke very frankly about his time at Nikkatsu: Nikkatsu Studios released two movies per week. The scripts were already written and those scripts were passed down to the directors[…]The schedule was tight[…] two movies a week. On average, we only had 25 days for shooting the film and three days for editing and sound mixing. A whole production usually took place in 28 days. (The Japan Foundation) These constraints allowed Suzuki, like the noir directors that came before him, some space to explore
the tropes in the genre films he was assigned. Whilst it could be argued that his earlier work with Nikkatsu was comparatively generic when put next to his last dozen or so films with Nikkatsu Studios, his latter projects were constantly pushing the boundaries of contemporary cinema. These experimental films amazed a small audience and while profitable, made the studios executives increasingly nervous. Suzuki was finally fired from Nikkatsu after releasing Branded to Kill in 1967, and he retaliated by suing the production company. He won the court case, but effectively found himself-black listed for a decade from all the major movie studios in Japan. His third to last film with Nikkatsu (and the beginning of the tipping point of his status at the studio), was Tokyo Drifter, a 1966 film that bent the expectations of the yakuza genre to breaking point. It was surreal in its use of colour, framing, and editing. It used exaggerated tropes from Western pulp fiction, while retaining a sense of being wholly Japanese. The lead character is silent, focused and untameable like a P.I. torn from MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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select the right sets, light them appropriately, and choose a costume for each character that not only reflected their personality, but drew the actors into the odd world Suzuki was constructing:
Fig.1 | Tetsuya walking down the deeply shadowed white corridor. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:17:30.
Fig.2 | The henchmen, clad in black, stand out in the all white set. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:18:56.
the pages of a Mickey Spillane book. However, this “Drifter” inhabits a world that is quintessentially Japanese, almost to the point of parody; in one scene, he strolls through the snow singing the film’s title song, like an enka singer or Japanese variety performer: Tokyo Drifter took pop art’s sly appetite for pastiche and appropriation and spun it into a cool web of subliminal associations, a flabbergasting assemblage of tough-guy kitsch, poetry and self-mockery. (Hampton) With the proliferation of the VHS and home cinema market in the 1980s, Suzuki found a growing audience of curious film lovers who came to appreciate his work, and Western film critics often refer to Tokyo Drifter as one of his most adventurous projects. While everything in the film could be read as psychedelic and superficial, Suzuki took great pains to 48 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
In order to make actors commit to play a character, the first thing you can do is to provide a costume[…]costume fitting is the beginning of character development[…]Even actors have regular lives. So, when they walk onto the film set, if they see a normal, everyday setting that they would know from their own life, it wouldn’t be a surprise at all. But, if you make the set extraordinary, they go, ‘“Woah this is wonderful!”’ Then they transform from everyday life to the character’s life. An excellent set gives them that. (The Japan Foundation) While these details were important to Suzuki, and his unconventional approach added to his world building, Nikkatsu were becoming increasingly frustrated with Suzuki and did not approve of the direction in which the film was heading. One scene in which the studio demanded a reshoot was the grand finale, the original of which depicted a felled tree painted a garish red and a bold green moon hanging low in a night sky. Testuya (Watari Tetsuya), our drifter, simply walks off and returns to his life of wandering. Suzuki explains how Nikkatsu felt disappointment and disapproval in equal measure: Nobody from the studio liked the movie and they said, ‘Why did you make this movie?!’ In the end they said I killed Watari’s career. So I had to re-shoot the last scene of the film because the company ordered me to do so. (The Japan Foundation) The studio was extremely annoyed with the final scene and demanded something more action packed. What Suzuki delivered is a memorable and chaotic scene, which he hoped would appease the studio by supplying the action, yet allowed him to stick to his guns in providing a stylized and rich closing scene that is open to be read in a variety of ways.
Adam Lee Miller
Fig.3 | The tossed gun of a fallen henchman. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:18:58.
As we explored before, set design and costuming were key foundations of Suzuki constructing the unique atmosphere in his films. The scene begins with a wide shot of Chihiro (Chieko Matsubara), our captured heroine, illuminated by a spotlight and standing below a red hoop-like structure in an otherwise pitch black set; the camera pans to show Tetsuya standing at the end of a long, narrow and angular hallway, which is as stark white as the suit he is wearing, but striped with deep shadows that cause Tetsuya to step in and out of the light. He blends in naturally with his surroundings and we cut to a close up of his calm demeanour before he ducks into the shadows of an archway, which leads into a large, dark set. Bright lights suddenly illuminate the set and we get a quick succession of close ups that show the panicked gang boss, Kurata (Ryuji Kita), the surprised Chihiro, the fearful piano player scrambling for cover, and a henchman clad in a formal black suit, who fires his gun at the intruder.
Fig.4 | Tetsuya trapping the hands of a would be killer. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:19:02.
Fig.5 | Tetsuya in white dominates the foreground, with his black-clad foe sitting in the background, seeming small and exposed. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:19:05.
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As Tetsuya shoots down each of the henchmen, a quick succession of shots show an open white room with white furniture, a white grand piano, our heroine, Chihiro, is clad in a white dress, and there are also free standing white pillars that support nothing but thin air. Contrasting heavily with this pure white atmosphere is the horde of gangsters clad in formal black suits, some with dark black sunglasses, another with a black eye patch, but all wearing black leather gloves and wielding black handguns. The only exceptions to this monochrome motif is an odd moon-like sculpture that hangs from the rafters and is a blood-red colour. There is also a glass set in front of the gang boss, Kurata (Ryuji Kita), which glitters very subtly, but still manages to draw the eye in the otherwise sparse setting. Everything that contrasts with the colour white is clearly visible and stands out, perhaps showing how easy these targets are for our hero to find. From the slow and calm opening of the scene that gives us the lay of the land, the action becomes a mix of fast cuts and close ups as Tetsuya dispatches the gang members one by one. Almost every gang member fires at Tetsuya missing their target only to fall prey to his deadly accuracy and crafty ploys to trick them.
Fig.6 | The moon-like sculpture shines a vibrant red to show danger. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:19:39.
Fig.7 | It changes colour to white to show peace. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:19:42.
At one point, everyone clambers for cover, and the action grinds to a halt. We get extreme close ups of panicking gang members juxtaposed with the thoughtful and calm expression on Tetsuya’s face. An example of this blend of slow and rapid editing sees Testuya sliding his gun into the centre of the room, disarming himself. Here the editing slows down, and a number of medium shots show the remaining gangsters closing in on their mark, surrounding him. A wide shot shows Tetsuya dashing for his gun, there is a quick cut to a close up of a gangster being shot, then a jump back to the previous wide shot where two more men are killed, and finally there is a close up of a gun which was inadvertently f lung in the death throes of one of the gangsters and lands on the piano, striking a sudden and sombre note.
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Fig.8 | The halo behind Chihiro shows her angelic quality. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:20:56.
Adam Lee Miller
Tetsuya traps the hands of a would-be killer in the piano and we are presented with a wide shot, with Tetsuya in the foreground and the gang leader in full view in the background. The shot is held for almost 30 seconds, a rest from the break neck speed of the editing previous to this final stand-off, and a chance for our strong but mostly silent hero to confront his final foe. Tossing his gun into the air and chasing after it, Tetsuya becomes a moving target, one too quick to be hit by the gang leader. Our hero catches his gun and shoots and wounds the gang leader, who slumps onto his table. Tetsuya then dispatches of the last of the henchmen and at the same time the unnatural red of the moon drains away and it too becomes white, blending into the rest of set. The danger has passed and there are no visual distractions to divert the viewers’ attention away from the dialogue that is about to unfold, apart from an array of bodies dressed in black strewn across the set. Again, the pacing slows to a crawl as Tetsuya approaches his wounded rival. He then crushes the aforementioned glass and suggests Kurata commit suicide with the shards. Tetsuya strolls over to Chihiro, and they embrace, the moon turning a soft yellow while the music of the soundtrack slowly comes, the first nondiegetic sound in the scene. The piano player walks off unharmed, and we get a close up of Tetsuya who looks unmoved and uncomfortable in Chihiro’s embrace. A reverse shot shows Chihiro realising this is the last time she will see Tetsuya, the soft yellow moon shining over her head like a halo, just one indication that she is too pure for Tetsuya. Kurata then slits his own wrists, spurting red over the table, Chihiro turns away in disgust, and Tetsuya looks on unfazed.
Fig.9 | Bright neon lights end the scene with a flourish of colour. Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:22:05.
Fig.10 | A monochrome final shot decorated with a bold green “終” Tokyo Drifter. DVD, Nikkatsu, 1966. 1:22:42.
Tetsuya cannot be with Chihiro, and instead must return to his life as a wanderer. A wide shot is held as Tetsuya leaves her, showing the carnage he has caused to secure her safety. The moon remains a mild yellow colour, functioning as a bold indicator of the action that unfolds during the scene; ir begins with red to symbolise the danger, then drains of its colour when MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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the danger is dispatched. In turning white, it shows that Tetsuya could stay with Chihiro, blend in and be safe, but that is not in his nature; nor is it in the nature of the moon to be a bleached white colour. The final yellow moon is normality returning, the natural colour of the moon coming back as Tetsuya realises he must return to his true calling: to be the Tokyo drifter. We are shown the distraught Chihiro as Tetsuya leaves, and then we return to the same long corridor that opened the scene, as he walks off. This is a contorted ref lection to the opening shot: Chihiro is now safe under a yellow moon, not standing in darkness under a red one, yet she is still distraught that Tetsuya is leaving. The same panning technique leads us to the angular hallway again, this time showing Tetsuya walking away from the woman that loves him; his way of saving her as he believes her to be much safer without his company. This calm ending is juxtaposed with quick flashes of bold neon lights advertising companies such as Karaoke halls and steak houses, perhaps a nod to what Howard Hampton described as the film’s “appetite for
pastiche and appropriation,” or perhaps Suzuki was again trying to appease the executives at Nikkatsu with visuals that are both entertaining and familiar. Finally, we return to Tetsuya, again in his white suit, leaning casually on a staircase painted white. This exterior shot is painted to look like the sound studio in which the previous scene took place; some patches of paint are drier than others, giving the white wall an inadvertent texture. You can almost see the hurried brushstrokes used to prepare this final shot and squeeze it into the tight deadline. With the bleached white building on the left of the screen and deep shadows on the right, Tetsuya walks off into the morally ambiguous representation of his personality, never fully entering the darkness. Before he disappears into the shadows, an end title screen appears with, “終”or “the end” in a bold green. Is this green merely a stylistic choice to counteract the crisp monochrome of the final shot, or was Suzuki sneaking in a subtle version of the green moon he initially envisioned for the finale? Either way, it is a striking ending to one of his most unique films.
WORKS CITED Hampton, Howard. “Tokyo Drifter: Catch My Drift.”
The Japan Foundation and Filmforum (Los Angeles)
December 13 2011, www.criterion.com/current/
retrospective of Seijun Suzuki’s work at the Nuart
posts/2095-tokyo-drifter-catch-my-drift. Accessed
Theatre in Los Angeles. March 1997, www.youtube.
May 1 2018.
com/watch?v=pjk9yV4nbqI. Accessed May 1st 2018.
th
st
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DVD · BLU-RAY REVIEW
Bill and Betty and Olive: A 21st Century Melodrama
BY TROY MICHAEL BORDUN | Concordia University and Trent University
enjoy: in fashioning “biopics” as Western romances or epic dramas, producers appealed to the widest possible audience (58-59).
D
o biopics share any generic codes and conventions? Surely the historical status of protagonists is not sufficient criteria to form a genre. Perhaps to call a film a “biopic” is a misnomer. Rick Altman argued a similar point in his seminal text Film/Genre, namely, that in early Hollywood, “biopics” were produced and marketed as part of already existing genres. He notes that producers were less interested in broad categorizations such as “biopic” and instead incorporated biographical pictures into profitable cycles. Specific elements of previously successful films were replicated and publicized with multiple points of entry and interest for the possible spectator (38ff ), such as, stereotypical characters, recycled plot points, and typecast actors. Additionally, in producing and marketing biographical pictures, studios would couple genres such that moviegoers of all genders could find something to
In Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), we can identify the same cycle/ genre games. On the one hand, the film is “Based on the incredible true story… [of ] The origin of an icon,” as the DVD packaging attests. There is something like a biopic here: a man struggles against all odds to create something significant, in this case, the comics superhero Wonder Woman. However, the film itself deploys the codes and conventions of Hollywood’s generic archetype – the melodrama (Lang 47) – thereby defying “biopic” expectations. Instead of the struggles of a creative genius coupled with a secondary story of romance, Professor Marston is primarily a melodrama about a polyamorous triad: William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), his wife, Elizabeth “Betty” Holloway (Rebecca Hall), and their lover Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote). In a supplementary interview on the DVD, Hall suggests that Professor Marston is “A classic film in the Golden Age of Hollywood… except this is a love story between three people.” The Golden Age here is, of course, the epoch of melodramas, and Robinson’s film is truly a melodrama fitted for the second decade of the 21st century: a BDSM-themed story with strong female leads. The film positions itself in the cycle of contemporary romance – reminiscent of
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DVD · Blu-Ray Review
Fig.1 | William Moulton Marston hounded by Josette Frank of the Child Study Association of America in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Opposite Field Pictures, 2017. 00:02:05).
the Fifty Shades series (2015; 2017; 2018) – rather than riding the coattails of Patty Jenkins’s 2017 blockbuster Wonder Woman. For Altman, melodramas are spectacles; the characters’ display of emotions and the presented episodes are in excess of the narrative function (qtd. in Williams, 603-604; cf. Elsaesser 507, 509). It is this excess that then makes its appeal to spectators’ emotions, usually intensified by music (Lang 49-50). Robinson certainly alters details of Marston’s life in favour of emotional intensity. Depicting Marston as true-to-life seems less concerning than her efforts to showcase the melodramatic imperative; as Marston mentions a few times, love conquers all and “the world can’t stop us.” While the first half of the 20th century would see Marston’s naivety put to the test, this film’s production and release in 2017 is timely: as heteronormativity and compulsory monogamy wane, love can flourish like never before. Professor Marston employs a familiar melodrama device: recollections of the past through a key moment
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set in the present. When the story begins in 1943, Marston is hounded by Josette Frank of the Child Study Association of America (Fig. 1). Her concern?That the sadomasochism and latent homosexuality depicted in comics featuring the Amazon hero would inf luence children’s morals and behaviour. Marston was called upon to defend Wonder Woman, a character who debuted in All Star Comics in December 1941 (Fig. 2). He accounts for the character, the plots, and the kink by referring to his psychological theory, DISC: dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. He suggests that we can best explain human behaviour through four categories: 1) Dominance is the drive to subjugate a weaker force; 2) compliance marks the reluctant position of giving into the stronger force; 3) inducement is the act of convincing, even rewarding, a weaker force into the final category; 4) willing submission. Since Marston believed that people are happiest when submitting to a loving authority – and men are prone to more aggressive forms of dominance and compliance – women should be in power, ruling with peace and love, inducement and submission. “Frankly,”
Troy Michael Bordun
he said, “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world” (Lepore 190-191). Through the Professor’s defense of Wonder Woman, we f lash back not to the character’s humble beginnings but to the start of a romantic relationship that would last the rest of his life. Robinson prefers this melodramatic arc to the tortured artist narrative: Poly relationships or ‘kink’ on film have usually been portrayed as salacious or transgressive in a negative way and I didn’t want to do that. Narratively, I wanted to make a really accessible story that told the story of three people falling in love. I would rotate the point-of-view of the film through each of their viewpoints. I wanted the audience to root for them to be together. (qtd. in Smith) The film f lashes back to Radcliffe, 1928. Olive enrols in a psychology course with Marston. Elizabeth is there but relegated to his assistant – she could have been a professor had she not lived in a time of rampant misogyny when Harvard did not grant women PhDs. Their initial encounter is not meet-cute: Olive applies for a research position with Marston, and Elizabeth, too strong and honest for her own good, demands she not “fuck” her husband for “professional reasons.” She later apologizes over drinks and the three begin conducting research, particularly on the polygraph. Although Marston is often solely credited, the film suggests that all three were jointly responsible for the invention of the systolic blood pressure cuff, a necessary component of the lie detector, the invention and use of which becomes a key part of their love story. In separate sequences, while hooked into the machine, Marston and Olive confess their love for Elizabeth and each other. During the first polygraph test and in a bid to intensify audiences’ emotional involvement, Marston’s confession causes Elizabeth to storm out and Olive to pursue her. Surprisingly, Olive then declares her love for Elizabeth, to the latter’s disgust, and the
Fig.2 |All Star Comics #8, December 1941-January 1942, written by William Moulton Marston, art by Harry G. Peter, collected in Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Omnibus Volume 1, DC Comics, 2016.
three have a falling out. But here we begin rooting for unconventional love. Some days later, Elizabeth changes her mind and very frankly proposes to Olive that they could all “fuck.” Olive barely has time to reply and the idea is dropped. Instead, the young student’s engagement to Brant, a staunch traditionalist, is foregrounded. Shortly thereafter, when Olive takes her own polygraph test, it is drama, sexual desire, and love that form the backdrop. In this wonderful scene, Marston asks Olive whether she’s in love with him and Elizabeth and whether she desires them sexually. Exhibiting sexual anxiety, a melodrama convention noted by Thomas Elsaesser (505), and aware that her lie will be exposed, Olive nevertheless replies in the negative. The polygraph juts up and down as every no really indicates a yes. This time
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Olive rushes off in tears and Elizabeth pursues; they make-out brief ly before Marston enters, and then the three have sex on the school’s stage where beforehand students rehearsed a Greek drama. The coming together and falling apart of the triad’s relationship thus relies on chance, namely, the invention of the lie detector and their confessions. Altman observes that melodramas rely on coincidence, and according to Chuck Kleinhans, the appeal of melodramas is that such coincidences are also like real life (Kleinhans 200). Although I brief ly observed that the film is best placed in a cycle alongside Fifty Shades, Professor Marston is only partly composed of sex scenes such as the above, and they are relatively tame representations. For instance, Peter Bradshaw calls this threesome “the most tasteful [i.e., boring] … sex scene in history.” It lacks any kind of continuity or realism and fails to approach the sensuality of another eroticized scene. At a “Baby Party” earlier in the film (freshmen dress up like babies and the older ones humiliate and paddle them), sorority sisters force Olive to spank a pledge while Marston and Elizabeth watch from a distance and they all get aroused (Marston and Olive did research the social rituals of sorority sisters at Tufts [Lepore 114-115]). But the onstage ménage a trois has its purpose: the triad subtly exhibits their interest in BDSM. Bill and Betty and Olive begin a life together, expressing what Robert Lang and Elsaesser call the true subject of melodrama: middle-class families (49; 507). Despite Marston’s insistence that the world can’t stop their love, it certainly tries. The Marstons lose their jobs and struggle to find work in their fields, their child gets picked on at school, and the neighbors ostracize them. Elizabeth realizes the world is not ready for their love and ends the arrangement. Olive parts and, of course, we hope for their reunion. However, following melodrama conventions, a sacrifice is first required to ensure characters’ happiness and future (Kleinhans 201; Williams 727-728). Towards the end of the film, Marston is diagnosed with cancer. In the hospital, he makes a final effort
58 Vol.03, No.02 | Winter 2018
Fig.3 | All Star Comics #1, Summer 1942, written by William Moulton Marston, art by Harry G. Peter, collected in Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Omnibus Volume 1, DC Comics, 2016.
to right past wrongs and calls Olive and Elizabeth together, knowing that for Olive to forgive Elizabeth, their respective roles of submissive and dominant must be reversed. Marston pleads for Elizabeth to get on her knees and ask for forgiveness; when she refuses, he exclaims, “I’m dying!” She tearfully apologizes to Olive, making Marston’s looming death the necessary precondition for reunion. He dies shortly thereafter (1947), yet the two women lived together until Olive’s death, 38 years later. So where does Wonder Woman, a.k.a. Diana Prince, fit into all this (Fig. 3)? According to the melodramatic arc, the triad’s relationship and socio-economic positions provide influence and motivation for the idea of a superhero. When the Marstons lose their jobs, the Professor starts researching bondage and popular culture such as
Troy Michael Bordun
Fig.4 | In Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Opposite Field Pictures, 2017, 1:14:12), Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne participate in BDSM.
pornography and comics. In one of the film’s strongest scenes, the three attend a bondage workshop. Marston and Olive volunteer and Elizabeth cries to Olive, “How could you let him do that to you?”, before f leeing. Marston gives chase and here Hall delivers one of the film’s best lines, a line that puts Marston’s feminism into question: “When are you going to stop justifying the whims of your cock with science?” Upon their return to the workshop to retrieve Olive, they find her dressed in what would later become Wonder Woman’s iconic outfit. Elizabeth’s interest in bondage takes a turn and, as a kind of antithesis to Fifty Shades, she binds Olive – with explicit consent (fig. 4). As Marston watches the scene, the backdrop and lighting clearly suggest that this is a revelatory moment for him, as well as the titular wonder women. A combination of several factors – namely, his polyamorous relationship, desire for BDSM, and lack
of an income – gives Marston the idea that a female superhero could make a splash with young male readers, especially given his knowledge of psychology. The film incorrectly shows Marston approaching Max Gaines of All-American Comics and pitching Superma, the Wonder Woman (in fact, after Marston’s successful interview with Olive on the positives of comics, published in Family Circle in October 1940, Gaines asked Marston to be his comics’ educational consultant and later, Gaines’s editor Shelton Meyer tasked Marston with creating a female superhero). But the latter half of the film does not quite explore the work of comic authorship, the industry, or the success of Marston’s character, for the creation of a superhero is merely the setting for the melodrama, all the more emphasized by the musical accompaniment. As melodrama convention dictates (Schatz 148), the love scenes and the emotionally intense ones are punctuated with saccharine strings and soft piano, scored by Tom Howe.
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While the film focuses on Marston, and to a lesser degree Elizabeth, Olive is almost forgotten. Despite Robinson’s insistence in a supplementary DVD interview that the three are equally shown onscreen and Olive is the strongest character, Olive spends most the film in tears and nothing of her story is detailed. Early in the film, Olive mentions she might want to go to school for journalism, but it isn’t broached again, and the film takes no interest in what she was doing in the 1930s and 1940s except raising kids and living with the Marstons. During this period, she was mostly a stay-athome mom, but did pen some articles for Family Circle.
Marston’s biography, the comics industry at the time, or Wonder Woman’s legacy. An interview with comic authors or editors, or even older Wonder Woman fans, could have been a valuable addition to the DVD. For example, Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette could have been perfect interview subjects, as their graphic novel Wonder Woman: Earth One (2016) returned the character, world and plot to Marston’s initial imaginings (Morrison, qtd. in Downey).
The DVD includes two very short and mostly un-
Despite its faults and historical inaccuracy, the film is a watershed moment for popular cinema. Representations of non-monogamous relationships usually depict the perils of cheating and affairs, the impossibility of
informative interview/behind-the-scenes segments with the director and cast, focusing on the production of the film and their thoughts on the unconventional love story, respectively. We do learn that Professor Marston was an eight-year passion project for Robinson, but few other comments are worth noting. Missing from the supplementary material is any background about
an illicit love, or overly eccentric swingers (Bordun, “Six Films about Non-Monogamous Relationships”). Conversely, according to Anna Smith, Professor Marston is “The most positive depiction of polyamory… in mainstream film to date.” Forgoing aspirations towards a “biopic”, i.e., a true tale of struggle and art, Robinson directs a melodrama for the 21st century.
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Troy Michael Bordun
WORKS CITED Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. BFI, 1999. Bordun, Troy Michael. “Six Films about Non-Monogamous Relationships that Don’t Suck.” Slutever, 17 April 2018. slutever.com/films-about-non-monogamy/. Accessed 3 July 2018. Bordun, Troy Michael. “Wonder Woman’s Kinky History.” Slutever, 31 May 2018. slutever.com/wonder-woman-kinky-history/. Accessed 3 July 2018. Bradshaw, Peter. “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women review – vanilla-flavoured origin story.” The Guardian, 9 Sep. 2017. www.theguardian.com/ film/2017/sep/09/professor-marston-and-the-wonder-women-review-wonder-woman-toronto-film-festival-tiff. Accessed 12 May 2018. Downey, Meg. “Morrison & Paquette On Wonder Woman: Earth One Costumes & Controversy.” CBR, 20 October 2017. www.cbr.com/interview-grant-morrison-yanick-paquette-wonder-woman-earth-one/2/. Accessed 3 July 2018. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 496510. Kleinhans, Chuck. “The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner’s Marked Woman.” Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, edited by Marcia Landy. Wayne State UP, 1991, pp. 197-204.
Lang, Robert. American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli. Princeton UP. 1989. Langley, Travis. “Introduction: Truth.” Women Woman Psychology: Lassoing the Truth, edited by Langley and Mara Wood. Sterling, 2017, pp. 1-11. Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Morrison, Grant and Yanick Paquette. Wonder Woman: Earth One, Volume 1. DC Comics, 2016. Schatz, Thomas. “The Family Melodrama.” Imitations of Life, 1991, pp. 148-167. Smith, Anna. “How movies brought polyamory into the mainstream.” The Guardian, 16 Nov. 2017. www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/16/sex-wonder-women-threesomes-polyamory-film-professor-marston. Accessed 12 May 2018. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Theory and Criticism, 7th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 602-616. Williams, Linda. “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama.” Critical Visions in Film Theory. 2011, pp. 725-738. Wood, Mara. “Dominance, Inducement, Submission, Compliance: Throwing the DISC in Fact and Fiction.” Wonder Woman Psychology. 2017, pp. 27-40. ---. “Feminist Psychology: Teaching How to be Wonderful.” Wonder Woman Psychology. 2017, pp. 173-186.
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Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk as Film and History BY TRACEY J. KINNEY | Kwantlen Polytechnic University
O
n 10 may 1940, German forces launched a comprehensive assault against the Low Countries and France. Bypassing France’s vaunted Maginot Line defences, the Germans drove the French defenders, and their British and Belgian allies, rapidly northwards towards Calais on the coast of the English Channel. Intense fighting ensued around the area of Calais and Dunkirk, though punctuated by a series of pauses as the German infantry attempted to catch up to its tanks and the German High Command debated as to whether the Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe should complete the annihilation of the Allied defenders.¹ The pauses between May 23 and early June offered a brief window within which
Fig.1 | British troops line the beaches of Dunkirk, 26-29 May 1940. Public Domain collection of the Imperial War Museum.
the British military command was able to attempt an evacuation of the hundreds of thousands of Allied troops stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk (Fig. 1). Ultimately, through a massive effort that included the so-called “Dunkirk Little Ships”, an array of fishing boats, pleasure craft, merchant marine, and coast guard vessels, some 338,000 British, Belgian, and French troops were rescued. The degree to which this marked a turning point in World War II is still debated, but the impact of the rescue on the morale of the British civilian population is unquestionable, prompting Winston Churchill’s famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech on 4 June 1940.² That Christopher Nolan’s surprise blockbuster³ Dunkirk (2017) takes an unconventional approach to these events should come as no surprise to viewers familiar with Nolan’s oeuvre. As in some of his previous films,⁴ the timeline is deliberately asynchronous – unfolding along three distinct time/story arcs: the hour-long f light of an R.A.F. Spitfire bound for the French coast; the day-long trip across the English Channel by the f lotilla of Dunkirk “Little Ships”; and the week-long effort to rescue the British and, eventually, some of the French soldiers from the beaches at Dunkirk. The storylines come together at the end of the film to clarif y the timeline for the viewer and to complete the story arc for each major character. Despite clarif ying the timeline for the
¹ Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of the Wehrmacht forces pursing the allied defenders, later argued that the pauses were an attempt to induce the British to accept a compromise peace. ² Despite the remarkable success of the evacuation, some 80,000 French and British troops were left behind - most to be taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht. ³ At a time when box office revenues were declining dramatically, especially in the United States, Dunkirk grossed $50.5 million in its opening weekend, $190 million in total in the US, and $337 million worldwide. See www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=chrisnolan2017.htm ⁴ Nolan’s Memento (2000) is perhaps the best example of this. The film was constructed through two separate narratives, one unfolding chronologically, the other backwards. Only at the end of the film did the two narratives intersect.
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Fig.2 | Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) scans the skies for incoming Luftwaffe planes. Warner Bros., 2017. 0:25:47.
Fig.3 | The first of three variations on death from above: soldiers waiting for rescue on the pier brace for an aerial attack. Warner Bros., 2017. 0:26:07.
Fig.4 | Soldiers on the beaches come under bombardment. Warner Bros., 2017. 0:07:09.
viewer, however, this is one of the few points where the film slides into the conventional tropes that too often characterize war films: the gallant pilot who sacrifices everything; the Commander who opts to stay until the last man is rescued⁵ (Fig. 2), and the heroic return of the evacuated soldiers to cheering British crowds. Nonetheless, for the most part the film is successful in steering clear of these stereotypical depictions of Allied soldiers in wartime. Setting aside the question of the film as history for a moment, Dunkirk’s effectiveness is twofold: first, in its ability to capture the environment within which the rescue took place; and second, in its focus on the wholly random nature of survival in wartime. With a $100 million budget, Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema chose to film in 65 mm with Imax cameras. The theatre viewer is thus quite literally immersed in the sights and sounds of Dunkirk: the claustrophobic scenes below decks on the rescue vessels, the wide shots of soldiers arrayed in long queues on the beaches, and the terror of the repeated German aerial attacks (Fig.3–5). Because the original setting proved virtually impossible to recreate, Nolan chose to film on the beaches of Dunkirk,⁶ providing an added layer of visual authenticity, as well as giving the viewer a sense of the unpredictable spring weather in French coastal towns. Indeed, the changing weather, along with brief explanatory ‘subtitles’, are two of the devices that allow the viewer to decode the various timelines among the three storylines. In the absence of a great deal of dialogue, the tension builds largely through the cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s omnipresent, foreboding musical score.⁷
Fig.5 | A drowning soldier cannot surface because of burning fuel oil. Warner Bros., 2017. 1:25:14.
⁵ The character of Commander Bolton was the subject of some controversy after Dunkirk’s release. The family of RCN Commander J. Campbell Clouston argued that the character was based the Montreal-born Clouston and that he should have received some mention in the credits; Nolan argued that the Bolton character was a composite of a number of Royal Navy officers. For more on the controversy, see Alan Freeman, “This War Hero was Forgotten in Canada, and Portrayed as a Brit in Dunkirk. Now he’s Finally getting his Due,” The Washington Post, 21 September 2017. ⁶ Andreas Wiseman, “Christopher Nolan explains why Dunkirk was a gamble that required a ‘leap of faith’,” Screendaily, 11 December 2017. ⁷ Dunkirk was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning for film editing, sound editing, and sound mixing. The dialogue is so minimal that the film was subsequently reedited as a silent film; see Christopher Hooten, “Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk works brilliantly as a silent film,” The Independent, 29 December 2017.
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That said, Dunkirk’s greatest power lies in the film’s ability to capture the utterly capricious nature of war, and to bring home to the viewer the degree to which survival was almost entirely a matter of luck. Heroes are few and far between in Nolan’s film: the Spitfire pilot (Tom Hardy) and notably, the pilots of the “Little Ships” who risked their lives and often livelihoods to enter a war zone on a near-suicidal rescue mission, are portrayed heroically. However, Nolan goes to considerable lengths to film the great mass of soldiers as exactly that: a faceless mass of soldiers forming orderly, but ultimately futile and even deadly, queues on the beaches; they are certainly not presented as heroes (Fig. 6). Devoid of agency and in most cases of dialogue as well,⁸ they simply await their fates. Wide camera shots capture the men lined up like sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe pilots. The few who take some initiative, apart from the main character, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), invariably end up dead or wounded. Even the Spitfire pilot ends up a captive of the German forces, his fate unknown to the film’s audience. Is Dunkirk good history, or even a good war film? No. The film is almost entirely lacking historical context. The actual battle for Dunkirk features only in the film’s opening sequence, and then merely as a backdrop to the survival story of Tommy, the film’s erstwhile protagonist. The German invasion of France is scarcely mentioned. Indeed, apart from the Luftwaffe, the German forces themselves are seldom seen. They exist simply as an omnipresent threat to the survival of the soldiers arrayed like dominoes along the beach. Only in the closing minutes of the film does Winston Churchill’s speech anchor the film to what would come next in the war. In short, viewers expecting to understand the nuances of the invasion of France, the Battle of Dunkirk, or indeed of Operation Dynamo – the actual evacuation plan – would leave the film disappointed. From a historical point of
Fig.6 | Faceless lines of soldiers queue on the beach awaiting rescue. Note the similarity to the IWM image from Dunkirk above Fig. 1. Warner Bros., 2017. 1:14:59.
Fig.7 | The Dunkirk “Little Ships”, a flotilla of small craft chosen for their shallow draft that gave them the ability to ferry soldiers to waiting destroyers. Warner Bros., 2017. 0:06:28.
view, the film over-emphasizes the role of the “Little Ships” (Fig. 7), while the destroyers of both the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy that rescued thousands of men from the ‘mole’ that protected Dunkirk’s harbour receive only the briefest of mentions. However, as Nolan himself noted in a November 2017 interview published in Variety, “I didn’t view this as a war film …. I viewed it as a survival story.”⁹ Thus, while Nolan’s original inspiration was Steven Spielberg’s masterful opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan (1998), a sequence that has been praised by veterans and historians alike for its authenticity, discussions with Spielberg ultimately led Nolan to conclude that the intensity of the first thirty minutes of Private Ryan could never be recreated. To Nolan’s mind, Spielberg had achieved the pinnacle of the war film, and Dunkirk needed to be something different altogether, an epic story of survival built upon “a
⁸ Only ten of the film’s characters are named. The remainder of the cast members are identified only by their role, so “French soldier,” “Grenadier,” “Warrant Officer”, and so on; see IMDb Dunkirk full cast and crew. ⁹ Brent Lang. “Christopher Nolan gets Candid on the State of Movies, The Rise of TV, and Spielberg’s Influence,” Variety, November 7, 2017. ¹⁰ Ibid.; see also, Anne Thompson, “Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk Broke the Rules by Ignoring Spielberg and Hiding Tom Hardy,” IndieWire, 9 February 2018.
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different kind of tension”.¹⁰ Suspense would be the key to Dunkirk’s success, rather than the tension generated by the painstaking recreation of every small historical detail that characterized Spielberg’s film. Nolan also eschewed well-known Holly wood actors in favour of a cast of largely British actors. While Branagh, Hardy, and veteran stage actor Sir Mark
Rylance play key roles in the film, it is not a star-driven vehicle. Instead, the atmosphere drives the film, the score reinforces the tension, and the audience is drawn into the story by the cinematography. In the end, Dunkirk is not a history lesson, but it is a masterful piece of filmmaking that transports its audience to a particular time and place, building empathy and understanding along the way.
WORKS CITED Box Office Mojo. Dunkirk. www.boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=chrisnolan2017.htm. Accessed 2 May 2018. Dunkirk. Internet Movie Database (IMDb), www.imdb. com/title/tt5013056/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt. Accessed 4 May 2018. “Dunkirk Trailer’s Beautiful Cinematography.” IGN, ca.ign.com/articles/2017/05/05/37-beautiful-shots-from-christopher-nolans-dunkirk-trailer. Accessed 22 March 2018. Freeman, Alan. “This War Hero was Forgotten in Canada, and Portrayed as a Brit in ‘Dunkirk.’ Now he’s Finally Getting his Due.” The Washington Post, 21 September 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/ wp/2017/09/21/this-war-hero-was-forgotten-in-canada-and-portrayed-as-a-brit-in-dunkirk-now-hes-finally-getting-his-due/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8117ad684e3f. Accessed 13 March 2018. Hooten, Christopher. “Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk Works Brilliantly as a Silent Film.” The Independent. 29 December 2017. Accessed 11 April 2018.
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Lang, Brent. “Christopher Nolan gets Candid on the State of Movies, the Rise of TV, and Spielberg’s Influence.” Variety, November 7, 2017, variety.com/2017/ film/news/christopher-nolan-dunkirk-oscars-movies-tv-spielberg-1202607836. Accessed April 11, 2018. Nolan, Christopher, director. Dunkirk. Syncopy/Warner Brothers Pictures, 2017. Thompson, Anne. “Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ Broke the Rules by Ignoring Spielberg and Hiding Tom Hardy.” IndieWire, 9 February 2018, www.indiewire.com/2018/02/christopher-nolan-dunkirk-brokethe-rules-oscars-hoyte-van-hoytema-1201926487. Accessed 15 May 2018. Wiseman, Andreas. “Christopher Nolan Explains why ‘Dunkirk’ was a Gamble that Required a ‘Leap of Faith’.” 11 December 2017, www.screendaily.com/ news/christopher-nolan-explains-why-dunkirk-was-agamble-that-required-a-leap-of-faith/5124856.article. Accessed 11 April 2018.
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The Three Winds of Albert Lamorisse Mark Goodall
FEATURETTES 47
Colour and Chaos: Unpacking the Mise-en-scène of Tokyo Drifter’s Reshot Finale Adam Lee Miller
REVIEWS 55
Bill and Betty and Olive: A 21st Century Melodrama Troy Michael Bordun
63
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk as Film and History Tracey J. Kinney
OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS
ISSUE 4.2 · WINTER 2019
For its upcoming issue, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual
(250-300 words); interviews (4,000-5,000 words); undergraduate
Narration (MSJ) currently seeks submissions that encompass the
scholarship (2,000-2,500 words) or video essays (8-10 minute
latest research in fi lm and media studies. Submission categories
range). All submissions must include a selection of supporting
include feature articles (6,000-7,000 words); mise-en-scène
images from the fi lm(s) under analysis and be formatted according
featurettes (1,000-1,500 words); reviews of fi lms, DVDs, Blu-
to MLA guidelines, 8th edition. Topic areas may include, but are
rays or conferences (1,500-2,500 words); M.A. or Ph.D. abstracts
not limited to, the following:
Mise-en-scène across the disciplines Transmedia Film spectatorship Auteur theory Adaptation studies
JUNE
3
Frame narratology Pedagogical approaches to fi lm and media studies Genre studies Cinematic aestheticism
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ABOUT THE JOURNAL Situating itself in film’s visual narrative, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (ISSN 2369-5056) is the f ir st of it s kind: an international, ABOUT THE JOURNAL in film’s visual peer-reviewed journalSituating focuseditself exclusively on narrative, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual the artistry of frame composition as a storyNarration (ISSN 2369-5056) is the first of openits kind: telling technique. With its open-access, an international, peer-reviewed journal focused review publishing model, MSJ strives to be a syn-exclusively on the artistry of frame as a ergistic, community-oriented hubcomposition for discourse story-telling its open-access, openthat begins technique. at the levelWith of the frame. Scholarly review publishing model,set MSJdesign, strives tocostuming, be a synergisanalysis of lighting, tic, community-oriented hub for discourse that begins camera angles, camera proximities, depth of at the level of the frame. Scholarlyare analysis of lighting, field, and character placement just some of set design, costuming, camera angles, camera proxthe topics that the journal covers. While primarily imities, depth of fidiscourse eld, and character concerned with in and placement around theare just some of the topics that the journal covers. While film frame, MSJ also includes narratological primarily with discourse in and around analysisconcerned at the scene and sequence level ofthe firelated lm frame, MSJ also includes narratological analysis media (television and online) within at scenePar and sequence level ofare related media itsthe scope. ticularly welcome ar ticles (television and online) within its scope. Particularly that dovetail current debates, research, and welcome articles that dovetail current debates, theories are as they deepen the understanding of research, and theories as they deepen the underfilmic storytelling. The journal’s contributing standing of an filmic storytelling. The journal’s contribwriters are eclectic, interdisciplinary mixture uting writers are an eclectic, interdisciplinary mixture of graduate students, academics, filmmakers, of academics, filmmakers, filmgraduate scholars,students, and cineastes, a demographic thatfilm scholars, andthe cineastes, demographic that also also reflects journal’s areadership. Published refl ects the journal’s readership. PublishedMSJ twice twice a year by Simon Fraser University, is a year by Simon Fraser University, MSJ is the offi cial the official film studies journal of Kwantlenfilm studies journalUniversity of Kwantlen Polytechnic in Polytechnic Vancouver,University Canada. in Vancouver, Canada. It is included EBSCO’s Film and It is included in EBSCO’s Filminand Television Television LiteratureLiterature Index. Index.